EITI official welcomes Azerbaijan’s decade-long contribution
By Aynur Jafarova
Azerbaijan has made its contribution to the development of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) for 10 years, head of the EITI International Secretariat Jonas Moberg said on September 26.
Speaking at a conference in Baku devoted to the tenth anniversary of Azerbaijan's accession to the initiative, Moberg said the main goal of the initiative is to ensure transparency and to provide the public with information on revenues from the implementation of mining industry projects. Thus, Azerbaijan has contributed to the development of the initiative, he said.
In his remarks head of the Azerbaijani state oil fund SOFAZ Shahmar Movsumov spoke about Azerbaijan's achievements over the past 10 years and expressed his confidence in the success of the initiative's development over the next decade.
According to him, new standards within the initiative will allow providing even more transparency and more detailed and necessary information on the mining industry projects.
Movsumov said a memorandum on applying the new EITI standards in Azerbaijan is to be signed by the end of 2013.
The memorandum will be signed with participants of the mining projects in the country and non-governmental organizations, reflecting the interests of civil society.
According to Movsumov, a special working group has been created as part of drafting this document.
The taskforce will finalize the initial version of the memorandum in October.
The new standards within the EITI envisage reflecting in annual reports the information on revenues from mining projects and deductions of each company.
According to the new standards, the companies involved in the initiative will be required to provide more detailed information about deductions, Movsumov said.
Movsumov told journalists that the EITI report on 2013 will be prepared in accordance with the new EITI standards.
He said that pursuant to the new standards, the report within the EITI will reflect not the total volume of transactions within the extractive industry, but the contributions of each company which is a member of this initiative.
Azerbaijan was among the first countries to endorse the Initiative in 2003, and the first one to receive a compliant status from the international EITI board in 2009.
EITI is a mechanism of disclosing oil and gas industry revenues for improving the transparency and accountability of public finance management. It was announced by British Prime Minister Tony Blair in September 2002 at the summit on sustainable development in Johannesburg.
Its purpose was to achieve transparency of the information about mining companies' payments to the governments of the countries possessing rich natural resources and the revenues received by the governments from these companies.