A roundtable Extractive Sector Transparency: Opportunities and Prospects for Donetsk Oblast was held at the Anti-crisis Media Center in Kramatorsk on 18 April. The event focused on discussing implementation of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) in Ukraine.
“The objective of implementing a transparency standard for extractive industries is a rational and open management of country’s natural resources and informing about the revenues of companies in the coal, oil, and iron ore sector,” says Olena Ahapova, an experts with the NOVA energia NGO. “The mechanism of this standard is that extractive companies provide information about their payments into budgets, and the government is publishing the revenue amounts. The data are summarized annually in the National EITI Report and are accompanied by an international expert evaluation. This process is controlled by the public.”
The first National EITI Report was published in 2015. It included the sectors of oil and gas extraction. The second Report was published in February 2017. It includes the data on coal industry and summarizes the data of previous years. The new Report pays more attention to the regions, and in addition to the information about payments, it also provides data about the beneficiary owners of extractive companies.
When discussing the transparency standard for extractive industries, the participants spoke about the effective management of resources of the Donetsk region in order to address the socioeconomic and energy problems of territorial communities. They made a special focus on the prospects for further development of the extractive industry, as well as opportunities of attracting the resources of environmental protection funds to mitigate the harm inflicted on the environment by the operating coalmines.
Implementation of EITI in Ukraine is supported by the Unites States Agency for International Development (USAID).
Glyanec