TORONTO: As business leaders overtake Washington, ideals are being sent to the dustbin of history.

Just a few days back, US President Donald Trump opted to sign the bill repealing the regulation that required American energy and mining companies to disclose their payments to foreign countries. The rule, born from the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act in 2010, faced a long legal battle and was not put into place until June 27, 2016.

Earlier in the month, the House Joint Resolution 41 thus eliminated the regulation issued by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) last June that would have forced energy and mining industries, involved in extraction in one form or the other, to report payments they make to governments abroad for access to natural resources.

The rule was meant to fight corruption in resource-rich countries by mandating that companies on United States stock exchanges disclose the royalties and other payments that oil, natural gas, coal and mineral companies make to governments. The SEC has been of the view that the regulation helps “combat government corruption through greater transparency and accountability.”

Republicans and energy companies, however, have been arguing for long that the regulation added costs and caused an unfair disadvantage on overseas projects.

The administration and congressional allies have also been saying that the SEC rule imposes massive, unnecessary costs on United States oil, natural gas, and mining companies, putting them at a significant competitive disadvantage to foreign companies that do not have to comply.

Exxon Mobil Corp, whose former CEO Rex Tillerson is now the Secretary of State, was one of the most vocal opponents of the rule, along with other major oil companies. According to Politico, Tillerson in 2010 personally lobbied against the provision of Dodd-Frank that led to the rule during the Obama era.

Siding with the oil industry and casting the rule as unnecessary and expensive, President Trump said at the signing ceremony that the legislation was part of a larger regulatory rollback that he and congressional Republicans were undertaking with the goal of economic and job recovery.

Later when President Trump asked Representative Bill Huizenga (Michigan) to speak about the legislation, the measure’s lead sponsor, emphasised: “Over (the last) 20 years, there’s been 56,000 rules that have been put in place, with very little legislative input or oversight, and it’s time that changed.”

Yet, the critics are in a rage. After the House initially opted to repeal the bill, Isabel Munilla of Oxfam International underlined that the “The US had been at the forefront of the transparency issue, with more than 30 countries following in its footsteps to pass similar legislation. State-owned companies from Brazil, China, and Russia are all now required to disclose their payments. If the Senate follows suit in overturning this rule, the US will go from a leader into a laggard.”

Munilla then emphasised: “Voting to roll-back basic transparency rules provides zero benefit for the public but will instead allow corrupt elites to continue to stuff their pockets with oil money and steal from their citizens”

Eric LeCompte, executive director of the religious development organisation Jubilee USA, said: “In the short term, we lost a tool that can help track the billions of dollars lost to corruption and tax evasion in the developing world. Improving financial transparency and ending global poverty are two sides of the same coin.”

Major oil companies have been under intense scrutiny in recent months. Late last year, Russia sold a 19.5 per cent stake in its giant oil company Rosneft, but the full identities of those who bought it are unknown — as yet.

Also, ExxonMobil, then led by Tillerson, was under investigation by Nigeria’s economic and financial crimes commission over lucrative oil rights it secured in 2009 by beating out China’s fourth-largest oil producer, despite apparently underbidding its rival bid by $2.25 billion, the Guardian revealed last year.

Critics are also pointing out that US oil majors, Exxon and Chevron aren’t listed on the European exchanges. Hence they don’t have to comply with the EU disclosure rules. That may give them an undue edge over other oil majors who must report project-level payments.

A new United States is emerging from the ashes of the November election. And this United States is too different from the one we all knew and literally respected — for decades.

Published in Dawn, February 19th, 2017