Statoil: Transparency on Payments to Governments

The Statoil case describes the challenge of increasing transparency, in extractive industries, around host county government payments. The case describes Statoil's reasoning behind voluntarily disclosing host country government payments, and the events that led to this decision. It also articulates how both management and the board were thinking about difficult trade-offs in terms of costs and benefits in making this decision.
The case also describes self-regulatory and regulatory efforts to increase transparency. The first was the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), which is a set of reporting standards published by a coalition of companies, governments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). The second was legislation enacted in the United States under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (Dodd-Frank Act), which requires certain disclosures by natural resource extractive companies that are subject to the reporting requirements of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The SEC issued a final rule implementing the Dodd-Frank Act in 2013 but that rule had most recently been vacated by the US District Court and is now subject to being re-written by the SEC.
Therefore, the case allows for a discussion of firm-specific voluntary, industry self-regulatory and regulatory efforts in increasing transparency in extractive industries.