The need for transparency in the Gulf oil markets

While the Middle East makes baby steps towards implementing greater financial transparency, accountability and the rule of law, the region’s best-known commodity — oil — lacks transparency in the way tenders are allocated and, more disturbingly, in actual reserve estimates. Information on oil, the lynchpin of the Gulf economies and the catalyst for numerous conflicts, coups and much other skulduggery in the Middle East, is being held back from not only the people of the region, but also the very markets that rely on that energy. The most glaring examples are Iraq and Saudi Arabia. In Iraq the issue is over the proposed oil law, which would give multinational oil companies such as Conoco, ExxonMobil and Chevron first dibs on developing the country’s oil fields under contracts of up to 30 years. Iraqi politicians have complained that they don’t know what is going on with oil resources as the formulation