IEITI Future Reports: Expectations and Challenges

By Ahmed Mousa Jiyad.

On behalf of the Iraqi Government and IEITI, Mr. Alaa Mohie El-Deen, General Secretary of Iraqi Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (IEITI), invited me to attend the EITI Compliance & Second IEITI Report Conference held at Al-Rasheed Hotel on 3 April, and asked me to make a presentation, which took place at the Oil Cultural Centre, Baghdad, Iraq, on the 4 April 2013 as part of the said Conference.

The following abstract was based on the PowerPoint slides of my presentation: IEITI Future Reports: Expectations and Challenges.

Future IEITI reports, compared with 2009 and 2010 reports, are expected to be more thorough, comprehensive and challenging. This is due to:

1. The Revised Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative- EITI Standard, to be adopted at the general conference in Sydney-May 2013, would surely reflect the increasing importance of and pressure for real, effective and comprehensive transparency measures;
2. The complexity and diversity of the fiscal and financial frameworks of the contracting modalities in the Iraqi extractive industry, and lessons learned so far.

Thus, for Iraq, it is imperative to have functional IEITI structure and carefully planned reporting process with increasing contribution of the Iraqi content in the future annual reports.

The attached PowerPoint slides are divided into three parts:

• Part one provides brief review of the international efforts calling for more transparency, the requests by key civil society organization and EITI deliberations to revise its Standard.
• Part two introduces and elaborates on the concept of “Transparency Value Cycle-TVC”, which explains the flows of “resources and revenues” envisaged under the Iraqi long term service contracts-LTSCs and the relevance of TVC analysis for more, effective and comprehensive transparency measures in the Iraqi petroleum sector.
• Finally, part three proposes “Structural model and Reporting Process” for IEITI to enable this entity producing annual reports that comply with the Revised EITI Standard and properly cover all “resources and revenues” flows relating to LTSC and others.

Attached is the PowerPoint presentation.

Mr Jiyad is an independent development consultant, scholar and Associate with Centre for Global Energy Studies (CGES), London. He was formerly a senior economist with the Iraq National Oil Company and Iraq’s Ministry of Oil, Chief Expert for the Council of Ministers, Director at the Ministry of Trade, and International Specialist with UN organizations in Uganda, Sudan and Jordan. He is now based in Norway (Email: [email protected]).