Chad-CameroonPetroleumDevProject

If the Bank really wants to fight corruption, it has to work towards a cultural shift, supporting capacity-building measures that can help countries move away from a culture of impunity and towards the rule of law. Worse, at times it appears that the Bank plays a double role: crackdowns on bribery and fraud on one hand, enabling projects that reinforce the status quo on the other.

Certainly Bank financing has proven more beneficial to Exxon than to the people of Chad (false advertising?). The people of Chad are not doing better today by any measurable standards, but the government and the oil companies are doing quite well.

James

despite the claim by COTCO that about FCFA 12 billion was paid as compensation, findings indicate that there were enormous defections that deprived communities of huge sums of money.

Other problems raised include the non-compensation of many workers who sustained accidents at work as well as the non-payment of social dues and oil spills, with the most recent at the Kribi terminal in April 2010.

Meanwhile on June 4, in a village called Nkong-Zok II in the Mefou and Akono Division of the Centre Region, ex-workers of the pipeline project told the press that huge sums of money were deducted as social contributions by sub-contracting companies such as ATM Services, Doba Logistics Cameroun and Willbros Spie-Capag, but never paid into the National Social Insurance Fund, CNPS. The ex-workers brandished pay slips with deducted sums with one who suffered an FCFA 117 000 deduction each month. The former workers are now mounting pressure for COTCO to pay back the sums 'stolen' from them.

US Treasury quietly released a guidance note for multilateral development banks (MDBs) on developing countries and coal-fired power generation. The guidance emphasises that MDBs should build demand for no- or low-carbon energy sources. It also provides step-by-step procedures it wants MDBs to follow in order to ensure full consideration of no- or low-carbon options before approving fossil fuel power generation or retrofit projects. However nine executive directors (EDs), representing a number of middle- and low-income countries, have sent an angry letter to World Bank president Robert Zoellick, protesting against the US trying to use its influence as the Bank's biggest shareholder to direct Bank operations.

Stephen Kretzmann of NGO Oil Change International says, "this letter is a defence of multilateralism and UN authority, and an attack on US unilateralism. It appears to be a reaction to the process at Copenhagen and the US insistence on the centrality of the Bank."

Raman Mehta from ActionAid India, adds that “the developing countries are not asking for the right to pollute. They are defending their right to access energy. If the US wishes to accelerate the deployment of clean energy in developing countries, let it also pay its fair share of the incremental costs of moving away from coal.”