Lifting the lid on extraction

Oil and gas industries in the Middle East are among the least transparent in the world. According to the pro-transparency group Revenue Watch, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Algeria fall into the lowest category of “scant transparency” — meaning they publish almost no information about where their billions of dollars in oil revenues go — while Yemen, Iraq and Iran are in the slightly better “partial transparency” category. So when the European Union backed a deal on Tuesday demanding that all payments to governments over 100,000 euros ($130,000) by EU companies be made public, it may not have been well received in Riyadh or Algiers. Under the law, firms must report payments per project as well as on a country level. Major energy firms had pressed for exemptions, but none were granted. The legislation follows the passing of the 2010 Dodd-Frank law in the US that set similar requirements for American