The authors of the Cardin-Lugar Amendment have called on the Trump administration to overrule the Interior Department's announcement rescinding a rule forcing US extraction firms to disclose their payments to foreign governments.
U.S. Senator Ben Cardin and former Senator Dick Lugar, who drafted a bipartisan rule in 2010 that requires extractive industry corporations, like oil, gas and mining companies, to disclose payments they make to foreign governments for access to natural resources, issued a joint statement Monday after the U.S. Department of Interior announced the United States would effectively leave the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), a global standard to promote open and accountable management of oil and gas mineral resources.
After the US Congress passed a bill to repeal the Cardin-Lugar anti-corruption regulation on extractives industry transparency earlier this month, the Department of the Interior announced that the United States is withdrawing its efforts to seek validation by the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), a global anti-corruption effort to bring openness and accountability to the oil, gas and mining sectors.
The United States had been working towards complying with the standard since 2012, when it established a multi-stakeholder group of civil society, industry and government members to guide the process.
In response to the disclosure requirement that US passed into law, Europe and Canada enacted similar statutes on a faster time-table.
"What will those countries, or countries planning to join, say now at this American retreat away from transparency and accountability? Such a retreat is a retreat from our values, which give America its strength and its moral leadership in the world," Cardin and Lugar said.
"We hope that President Trump will reaffirm his trust in the American public and fight corruption. We call on him to overrule Interior Department bureaucrats to reassert U.S. commitment to EITI and to order his Administration to encourage passage of new transparency rules under existing law, the Cardin-Lugar Amendment," they added.
Separately, the civil society members of the U.S. EITI said in a joint statement that they are saddened and alarmed that the United States will no longer comply with the standard of a crucial transparency initiative that it has supported since 2003.
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