Foreign Affairs committee  I thank you for your time and your excellent questions.

Foreign Affairs committee  Well, if the EU, the U.S., Canada, and Australia, for example, all adopt the same disclosure requirements through their capital markets, you will begin to cover a large part of the world. The number of Chinese companies and the increasing number of developing country companies are listing somewhere—in London or Frankfurt or Toronto.

Foreign Affairs committee  Yes. Some of our colleagues in the Publish What You Pay coalition have been talking to the Shanghai Stock Exchange and we know that there's a harmonization discussion. Shanghai is not yet an integrated international capital centre. They clearly aspire to that. Beijing clearly aspires to have that happen, and Shanghai certainly does.

Foreign Affairs committee  The then acting energy minister in the transition government, after Gadhafi was overthrown, commented that Gadhafi and his family treated the country's oil income as their personal piggy bank. So Libya is a good example of the kinds of systemic issues we've been talking about with regard to having a strong international transparency standard.

Foreign Affairs committee  Certainly there are other contributions from the industry. To take the Zambia example, most of the taxes that the copper mining industry in Zambia contributes are basically the pension contributions of workers that the companies collect on behalf of the government. So it's really the employer's own taxes, not revenues that the company is paying to Zambia.

Foreign Affairs committee  I think many companies would like to have greater recognition of the contributions they make, the tax payments and the social payments they make. Sadly, in some cases the companies actually pay very little in tax for the very lucrative mining and oil and gas ventures that they have, and those are the companies that have been most resistant to the transparency regimes.

Foreign Affairs committee  You're the development committee, and you know this is a complex business. There is no single solution. You need to address a number of core issues simultaneously to have any sustained beneficial impact. One thing is having strong transparency rules, because that's a critical tool for accountability, but at the same time working with citizens and with parliaments, because in the end, parliaments should have the oversight responsibility for their own governments' actions.

Foreign Affairs committee  Yes. The U.S. law covers payments to the U.S. government as well. A major point of the intent of the law is to make information available to the citizens of countries where the government would prefer to withhold that information from the citizens. So in our view it's certainly not in the interest of the citizens of the countries where governments deny that information.

Foreign Affairs committee  There has been considerable debate about this law. Companies have certainly moved a long way in their attitudes toward transparency, in that most of the major industry participants in this debate have said they are all in favour of disclosing their payments, country by country, to governments, except when the government objects.

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you very much. I'm Karin Lissakers. I'm the director of the Revenue Watch Institute. We're a non-profit organization that works in resource-rich, mineral-rich countries around the world. Our focus is on seeing that the mineral wealth of developing countries is transformed into social and economic benefits for the countries producing those minerals.

Foreign Affairs committee  We work very cooperatively with the ICMM and other corporations in the EITI and other contexts.

Foreign Affairs committee  It is to promote effective, transparent, and accountable management of extractive resources for the public benefit in the resource-rich countries.

Foreign Affairs committee  I apologize to the committee. I was trying to abbreviate my remarks and left out the introduction. The Revenue Watch Institute is an independent, not-for-profit organization devoted to promoting effective, transparent, and accountable management of oil, gas, and hardened mineral resources in resource-rich countries.

Foreign Affairs committee  Our annual budget is almost $12 million.

Foreign Affairs committee  I'm at your disposal.