For Investors: Esoteric But Important

Financial Times is reporting: oil groups win...

Oil companies have won a court victory against the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the financial regulator, over new rules that would have forced them to disclose details of their payments to governments in countries where they operate.

The US District Court for the District of Columbia ruled yesterday morning that the SEC had misinterpreted Section 1504 of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial regulation act when drawing up regulations to implement the law.he rules proposed by the SEC would have forced companies to make public disclosures of their payments to governments, a measure that was strongly supported by Oxfam and other non-governmental organisations as a way to improve transparency and help fight corruption in resource-rich countries.

Oil companies had warned that publishing those payments would reveal information that could be valuable to their competitors, and would put them in an impossible position in four countries that prohibit such disclosure: Angola, Cameroon, China and Qatar.