Oil is a messy industry, in pretty much every conceivable way. There’s no such thing as clean oil, or an environmentally friendly oil company, but there are degrees of responsibility. Likewise with business ethics. The oil companies have been involved in some very murky business in the past, and some really do have blood on their hands. So, which is the best one to buy your petrol from? Here are the top five oil companies, and a few notes on their record.
This is the story of a trade that brings natural gas from the Central Asian country of Turkmenistan through Russia and Ukraine to the European Union (EU). Far from being open to scrutiny by the citizens of these countries, this trade has long been controlled by a handful of people and a series of mysterious intermediary companies. Although the business is worth billions of dollars a year, it is still unclear where much of this money goes.
The EU is increasingly reliant on gas supplies from the former Soviet Union.
Switzerland is about to reaffirm its commitment to fighting corruption and money-laundering, yet Geneva’s Public Prosecutor has inexplicably closed a corruption case linked to debt repayments by Angola to Russia.
G8 leaders in St Petersburg pledged to promote transparency in the management of oil revenues as part of international efforts to curb corruption and to stem the growing energy crisis that threatens the supply of resources to world markets.
London/Berlin – A majority of leading oil and gas companies are far from transparent when it comes to the payments they make to resource-rich countries, leaving the door open to corruption and hampering efforts to fight poverty, according to a report published today by Transparency International (TI).
London – In the wake of a recent report published by Transparency International [1], showing that leading oil and gas companies should be doing more to fight corruption and poverty in resource-rich countries, Publish What You Pay [2] calls on companies to publicly disclose how much money they pay to governments for the right to extract.