New ideas to en­hance col­lab­o­ra­tion be­tween nat­ur­al re­source rich coun­tries were pro­posed by T&T's del­e­ga­tion at the 6th Glob­al Con­fer­ence of the Ex­trac­tive In­dus­tries Trans­paren­cy Ini­tia­tive (EITI) held in Syd­ney, Aus­tralia from May 22-24.

"The EITI pro­vides an ex­cel­lent frame­work for broad­er gov­er­nance re­form in Trinidad & To­ba­go's crit­i­cal oil, gas and min­ing sec­tors", said Vic­tor Hart, chair of the lo­cal EITI steer­ing com­mit­tee, as he pre­sent­ed ideas on col­lab­o­ra­tion to pos­i­tive re­views at the clos­ing ple­nary of the con­fer­ence.Hart was co-leader of a six mem­ber del­e­ga­tion, along with Richard Oliv­er, Deputy Per­ma­nent Sec­re­tary of the Min­istry of En­er­gy and En­er­gy Af­fairs. The con­fer­ence drew 1,200 del­e­gates from 96 coun­tries, and more than 100 com­pa­nies and in­ter­na­tion­al or­gan­i­sa­tions.

At the con­fer­ence, a new EITI Stan­dard was agreed which will de­mand greater trans­paren­cy and ac­count­abil­i­ty from the 39 im­ple­ment­ing coun­tries. This re­lates to pay­ments made by ex­trac­tive in­dus­try com­pa­nies to their host gov­ern­ments on a com­pa­ny by com­pa­ny ba­sis and, where pos­si­ble, on a project by project ba­sis.

Dur­ing the con­fer­ence the UK and France an­nounced their in­ten­tion to sign up to the EITI. Re­gion­al­ly, Hon­duras joined Pe­ru, Guatemala and T&T as a mem­ber of the EITI.The T&T del­e­ga­tion took part in sev­er­al re­lat­ed par­al­lel events, in­clud­ing a min­ing for de­vel­op­ment con­fer­ence, an EITI com­mu­ni­ca­tions work­shop, and the EITI Na­tion­al Ex­po. At the lat­ter event, the T&T booth show­cased in­for­ma­tion on the coun­try's im­ple­men­ta­tion of the EITI and its wealth of ex­pe­ri­ence in oil and gas ex­plo­ration.