Pessoal, vou colocar as respostas ao longo da semana nesse pad < https://pad.okfn.org/p/globalwitiness>. Se alguém quiser dar uma mão, dê um toque. Vou tentar terminar antes de sexta. Abraços,
Tom ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Christian Villum <[email protected]> Date: 2014-10-20 8:47 GMT-02:00 Subject: [OKFN-Local-Coord] Global South Local Groups: Help save a vital piece of transparency and open data legislation To: Open Knowledge Foundation Local Coordinators Mailing List < [email protected]> Cc: Sam Leon <[email protected]> Dear Local Group coords, To groups based in the Global South: we need your help to save a vital piece of legislation. Take five minutes to answer these questions and play your part in holding oil companies to account. One of Open Knowledge’s partners, Global Witness <http://globalwitness.org>, is reaching out to local groups and chapters from the Global South to help save a vital piece of transparency and open data legislation in the United States that is under threat. The legislation concerns the disclosure of payments made by extractives companies to governments. The aim of the legislation is to bring much needed accountability to a sector that has the potential to be a vital source of revenue for many countries across the globe, but which suffers from corruption that too often diverts funds away from citizens and into the pockets of corrupt officials, or sees huge profits going to international oil companies. See for instance the OPL 245 scandal <http://www.globalwitness.org/shellagm/> that Global Witness exposed last year. More background on the legislation can be found below for those interested. Global Witness, on behalf of the Publish What You Pay <http://www.publishwhatyoupay.org/> coalition, is appealing to civil society organisations and Open Knowledge local groups from the Global South to answer a set of questions that will help strengthen the case against oil companies seeking to weaken this vital piece of transparency legislation. The idea is to collate responses from civil society to send to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in the US who are responsible for implementing this legislation. If you or members of your group are able to answer these questions, please fill in this form <http://bit.ly/1FpQXgp> [1]. We will not collate any of your responses or share any of your details until we have sent a follow-up email. If you have any questions about this campaign, do not hesitate to get in touch with [email protected]. This is a real opportunity to help make open data count, we look forward to hearing from you! [1] Questions form <http://bit.ly/1FpQXgp> -Christian --- Background The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is currently developing the implementing rules for Section 1504 of the Dodd-Frank Act. The rules will require all US-listed oil, gas and mining companies to publish details about their revenue payments to governments in every country they operate in across the world. The rules are designed to provide civil society organisations (CSOs) with data on the amounts of revenues companies pay to governments, such as taxes, royalties, bonuses and licence fees, from each and every project the companies’ operate. For example, communities living near mines or oil fields will be able to monitor all the revenues that are generated by a local extraction project and track them into the budget, and hold their government to account for how the money is used. It is hoped that this information will be useful to CSOs who want to ensure that the hundreds of billions of dollars in revenues generated by natural resources are used to benefit citizens, and to prevent corruption. However, some oil companies are lobbying to weaken the US rules in two key ways: 1) The oil companies want the payment data reports to be anonymous – companies’ names would not be made public, so that it would not be possible to trace any payments back to a specific company. 2) The payment data would not be disclosed at the project level. Instead, data from many different projects in a geographical area would be aggregated together. For example, taxes from all the oil projects in a country could be lumped together and reported as one payment – they would not be reported on a project-by-project basis. To help ensure the SEC introduces strong transparency rules, the Publish What You Pay coalition is encouraging CSOs to write letters to the SEC that highlight historical case studies of CSOs using financial data or similar information to successfully affect changes to government or company policies in the past, in the extractive sector or any other sector. The letters should also indicate that CSOs are likely to find the data from the US extractives transparency rules to be useful in future. Publish What You Pay can provide help to CSOs to produce these letters, which do not need to be long or technical. To counter the oil companies’ proposal for weak US extractive sector transparency rules, it is vital that any evidence given to the SEC shows that CSOs would benefit from using specifically company-level data and project-level data to hold the extractive industry and governments to account. -- Christian Villum International Community Manager skype: christianvillum | @villum <http://www.twitter.com/villum> Open Knowledge <http://okfn.org/> * - See how data can change the world*http://okfn.org/ | @okfn <http://twitter.com/OKFN> Facebook <https://www.facebook.com/OKFNetwork> | Blog <http://blog.okfn.org/> _______________________________________________ okfn-local-coord mailing list [email protected] https://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/okfn-local-coord Unsubscribe: https://lists.okfn.org/mailman/options/okfn-local-coord -- Everton Zanella Alvarenga (also Tom) Open Knowledge Brasil - Rede pelo Conhecimento Livre http://br.okfn.org
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