No one seems terribly excited when a company (simply) complies with rules and laws. What we seem to be looking for are companies that go beyond compliance to voluntarily commit to successively breathtaking thresholds of environmental and social impacts…and on a sustainable basis. When we do talk about the dark side of corporate integrity—we’re prone [...]
SEC Regulations Could Bring Oil Revenue Transparency To Uganda
Tuesday, July 26th, 2011Submitted by Alisa Zomer and Peter Veit Now twice delayed during the public comment and rule-drafting periods, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is due to release regulations for Section 1504 of the Wall Street Reform Act in late August. Recent developments in Uganda’s oil industry have made the release of these transparency provisions more urgent [...]
Christie Blatchford in Hobbema: Where does the money go?
Sunday, July 17th, 2011By: Christie Blatchford When you wade into the shark-infested waters of writing about matters aboriginal, you quickly learn how stupid you are. Well, that’s my experience. So it was with the Caledonia occupation; and this week again with the shooting death of Ethan Yellowbird on the Samson Cree First Nation, one of four First Nations [...]
Murdoch’s Political Money Trail
Friday, July 15th, 2011By: Laura Colarusso For most of his colorful career, Rupert Murdoch has had friends in high places. As the News of the World phone-hacking scandal has made clear, he and his lieutenants hobnob with such high-level British politicians as Prime Minister David Cameron. But Murdoch’s influence reaches far beyond the shores of the United Kingdom—and [...]
Native justice
Saturday, July 2nd, 2011From: The Calgary Herald A Federal Court ruling ordering Chief David Bearspaw and four band councillors removed from office for wrongly extending their terms in office is a triumph of democracy on First Nations reserves. Judge Richard Mosely ruled the native leaders were wrong to cancel the December 2010 election and extend their terms from [...]
Mistakes were made (but not by us)
Friday, July 1st, 2011A friend loaned me an intriguing book titled Mistakes Were Made (but not by me). It’s written by two psychologists, Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson. They ask: Why do humans share the impulse to justify ourselves and avoid taking responsibility for any actions that turn out to be harmful, immoral or stupid? It’s a fascinating [...]
Lawmakers Seek Inquiry of Natural Gas Industry
Tuesday, June 28th, 2011By: Ian Urbina WASHINGTON — Federal lawmakers called Tuesday on several agencies, including the federal Securities and Exchange Commission, the Energy Information Administration and the Government Accountability Office, to investigate whether the natural gas industry has provided an accurate picture to investors of the long-term profitability of their wells and the amount of gas these wells can produce. [...]
Calgary’s Niko Resources to pay $9.5M bribery fine
Friday, June 24th, 2011From: CBC News A Calgary oil and gas company, Niko Resources, has agreed to pay nearly $9.5 million in fines and penalties after admitting in court that it bribed a Bangladeshi government minister. Niko Resources Ltd. is an oil and gas producer with operations in Southeast Asia. The firm was charged under Ottawa’s Corruption of [...]
Encana-PetroChina deal collapse ‘an embarrassment’
Tuesday, June 21st, 2011By: Claudia Cattaneo The collapse of Encana Corp.’s $5.4-billion deal with PetroChina involving the sale of half of one of its major plays raises questions about the future of a major investment wave under way in Canada involving Asian buyers of natural gas resources in British Columbia. The deal would have been the biggest Chinese [...]