Interesting to watch the fall out from the Simandou debacle. Hope that justice is served to all. I see Trump has now made it easier to return to "business as usual"....so disappointing and truly pathetic.
Tuesday Trump signed a repeal of a bipartisan provision of the Dodd-Frank bill known as the Cardin-Lugar Amendment. The absurd history of this doomed provision stands as a perfect microcosm of how Washington works, or doesn't work, as it were.
The election of a billionaire president who killed the anti-corruption measure off is only the brutal coup de grace. The rule was stalled for the better part of six years by a relentless and exhausting parade of lobbyists, lawyers and other assorted Beltway malingerers. It then lived out of the womb for a few sad months before Trump smothered it this week.
Section 1504 of the Dodd-Frank Act was created by Maryland Democrat Ben Cardin and then Indiana Sen. Richard Lugar. Passed in 2010, the rule was simple: It required oil, gas and mining companies to disclose any payments above $100,000 made to foreign governments.
The law was designed to prevent energy companies from bribing foreign dictators. The simple goal was to ensure that the wealth of resource-rich countries would be enjoyed by their citizens, and not converted into obscene personal collections of yachts, mansions, sports cars and Michael Jackson memorabilia – as, for instance, it was when oil was discovered in Equatorial Guinea, and the brutal dictator Teodoro Obiang started doing business with Rex Tillerson's ExxonMobil.
The provision originally passed in the summer of 2010 and became law when Dodd-Frank was signed later that year. But it didn't go into effect right away. As hotshot Wall Street lobbyist Scott Talbott of the Financial Services Roundtable cracked, "When [Obama] signed the financial reform law, that was halftime."
After passage, the law went back to the SEC for the rule-writing process, where it spent two years being bandied around while special interest groups harangued the agency with suggestions and comment letters.
Those first years of SEC rule-writing included multiple meetings and rule addendum suggestions from trade groups like the American Petroleum Institute (API), as well as with executives from companies like ExxonMobil. (Exxon VP Pat Mulva and Corporate Securities and Finance Coordinator Brian Malnak met with the SEC twice in November of 2010.)
Then, on August 22nd, 2012, a version of the rule passed the commission by a vote of 2-1. Success! Yet shortly after the rule passed – on October 10th, 2012, to be exact – the aforementioned API, along with the Chamber of Commerce, filed a lawsuit against the SEC to block the provision.
The suit charged that the SEC "failed to conduct an adequate cost-benefit analysis as required by law" (this was a trick used multiple times to block Dodd-Frank provisions) and that the agency "grossly misinterpreted its statutory mandate to make a 'compilation' of information available to the public."
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