Chevron silent on bribery allegations By Marwaan Macan-Markar
BANGKOK - US energy giant Chevron is under fire for failing to disclose the
amount of money it paid to secure rights to drill for offshore oil in
corruption-ridden Cambodia.
''It is yet to respond to our detailed questions in a letter written to the
company in October 2008,'' said Gavin Hayman, campaigns director for Global
Witness (GW), a London-based anti-corruption watchdog. ''It is not in favor of
supplying information about what it pays foreign governments to secure rights
for oil exploration.''
Chevron's attitude towards disclosure ''will be telling'', he said in an
interview, since revelations could help measure the scale of ''under-the-table
payments'' involved in a country where a small
and powerful elite has ''captured the country's emerging oil and mineral
sectors'' for personal gain.
But disclosure about money paid to access the resource is only one part of the
transparency and accountability equation. Global Witness activists insists that
the oil companies should also disclose what they will pay Cambodia once the
revenue starts flowing.
Hayman made the comments following a launch here this week of a report by
Global Witness that warns of a corruption disaster as Cambodia ''appears to be
on the verge of an oil, gas and minerals windfall".
''Cambodia today is a country for sale,'' says the 68-page report. ''Having
made their fortune from logging much of the country's forests resources,
Cambodia's elite have diversified their commercial interests to encompass other
forms of state assets.''
The report, "Country for Sale", claims that "financial bonuses paid to secure
concessions [for oil and mining] - totaling millions of dollars - do not show
up, as far as GW can see, in the 2006 and 2007 revenue reports from the
Ministry of Economy and Finance. ... Oil company contracts and information on
concession allocations are a closely guarded secret within the CNPA [Cambodian
National Petroleum Authority].''
Yet what is better known is the presence of Chevron among the companies from
Australia, China, Indonesia, South Korea and the United States that have been
competing to secure rights to explore oil in the six blocks off Cambodia's
western coast.
''With the exception of Chevron, the government of Cambodia has not publicly
announced the names of those companies to whom it has awarded oil and gas
exploration rights,'' states the report. ''Block A was awarded to US oil
company Chevron in 2002. Chevron's activities in Block A are the most advanced
of all oil companies currently operating in Cambodia.''
Global Witness estimates that oil will start flowing in 2011 and peak in 2021.
Proceeds range from US$174 million in the first year to $1.7 billion when
extraction peaks.
Global Witness doubts whether such income from Cambodia's natural resources
will flow to those who need it most - the country's millions still mired in
poverty following nearly two decades of bloody conflict and a brutal rule by
the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime.
Currently, more than one-third of Cambodia's 13.3 million people live in dire
conditions on less than one dollar a day. United Nations reports have revealed
that life expectancy is 58 years, while nearly a third of children under five
years are malnourished.
Yet for a small cabal of political, military and economic elite, the period
since the 1991 peace accords has been a journey on the road to immense - and
ill-gotten - wealth. In 2007, for instance, Global Witness revealed in a report
that illegal logging in Cambodia by the elite raked in over $13 million.
Such greed by the elite has raised fears that Cambodia is on the verge of
becoming a kleptocracy; the country is already rated as among the world's most
corrupt. In 2007, the global anti-graft watchdog Transparency International
ranked Cambodia 162nd among 179 countries surveyed for corruption, making it
the most corrupt country in Asia after Myanmar.
The ease with which the powerful few have filled their personal coffers stems
from a lack of independent bodies backed by strong laws and resources to curb
corruption. ''Any state that has weak anti-corruption institutions is not going
to have proper level of oversight,'' says Donald Bowser, head of the Cambodia
office of the Mainstreaming Anti-corruption for Equity Project, funded by the
development arm of the US government.
''There are local concerns about the misuse of the country's extractive
industry for personal gain,'' Bowser said during a telephone interview from
Phnom Penh. ''A civil society coalition has been formed to campaign against
this form of corruption.''
But such campaigns face a daunting challenge. The Cambodian government, under
the grip of an increasingly authoritarian Prime Minster Hun Sen, has yet to
implement strong anti-corruption measures that have been called for by the
country's foreign donors, who fund nearly half the national budget.
Activists like Hayman of Global Witness also point fingers at international
financial institutions, including the World Bank, for being complicit in the
corrupt culture of Cambodia's rising kleptocrats. ''The World Bank is
particularly bad,'' he charges. ''They have a bad track record of forgetting
civil society to monitor all steps of programmes in Cambodia to ensure
accountability.''
However, the bank thinks otherwise. ''The World Bank shares many of the
concerns NGOs [non-governmental organizations] have raised about the
government's management of extractive industry in Cambodia,'' it said in a
statement released to IPS from its Phnom Penh office.
''Although the Bank has not been directly involved in extractive industries in
Cambodia, our dialogue with the government includes discussion of policy
reforms that will help to ensure that any revenue generated through extractive
industries benefit the people of Cambodia,'' it said.
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