 Okay, welcome everybody. I'm Tony Addison, a non-resident research fellow at UniWide. And a professor of development economics at the University of Copenhagen. People are just flowing into the meeting now and we have quite a large number. I could ask everybody to keep their microphones muted. This webinar is one of the series of webinars in Wider's Domestic Revenue Mobilization Research Program, which has been going on now for nearly four years. The webinar today is a collaboration between two themes of DRM, the Extractives for Development theme, which is led by myself, and the Illicit Financial Flows theme, which is led by Professor Finn Taft of BRG Copenhagen University. In this one hour event, we are going to have three speakers on the theme today, which is corruption and theft in the global oil and gas sector. The first speaker will be Etienne Romsen. Etienne is president of EnergyCC, an institution which is particularly concerned with climate impacts in the oil and gas sector. He is a former global executive vice president for DNVGL and managing director of Shell Exploration and Production in Kuwait, where he developed and led many complex projects in oil and gas. Etienne has authored two Wider working papers on global oil theft. I will be putting the links to those papers in the chat, as well as co-authoring two further papers for the Wider project with Catherine McPhail, also of EnergyCC, on gas flaring and venting, which I do recommend you take a look at. Our second speaker today will be Giovanna Marcolonga, who is a postdoctoral fellow at the Crime and Law and Economic Analysis Unit at Baconi University, where she works on crime economics and political economy. Giovanna has authored a paper for Wider on the role of Shell companies in tax havens as facilitators of corruption in oil and gas, and we will begin putting a link into the chat for Giovanna's paper. Our third speaker, who will be acting actually as discussant, is Steve Caizzi McGewa, who is a senior consultant researcher at Zika and associates in Washington DC. Steve was previously acting chief economist and vice president of the African Development Bank, an IMF staff member in the Independent Evaluation Unit of the Fund, a research fellow, and has advised many African governments. Etienne will give the first presentation, followed by Giovanna, and then Steve will provide discussion of the two. We will take a selection of questions for the panel from the chat, bearing in mind that this is a one-hour webinar and we aim to try and finish roughly on time. So, welcome everybody and let us without further ado, move to the presentation by Etienne Romsson. Etienne, please. Thanks, Tony, for the introduction. I'll share my screen and hopefully just checking if that is visible. Yes, that's visible. Let me start. And I want to start the topic of global oil theft. We have actually a video kindly created by you and your wider. So I'm going to play it now and hopefully it will come through. Okay, that was that. Okay, indeed. So actually the video gave the key messages already. And let me give some more background to oil theft and some key observations from the study work that I've done. So in this first slide, you can see a sample of known oil theft cases. And this is by no means a complete list of the known thefts. And moreover, many thefts are not discovered nor reported. So one of you does show is that oil theft is a global phenomenon, and it affects many countries. And although low and middle income countries are often worst affected by it, oil theft is not a developing countries problem. UK, the US and Singapore are all examples where large oil theft do occur. So some observations on oil theft. The scale of global oil theft is highly significant. And there are no signs that the amount of money involved or the amount of oil that's being stored in is receding. Current high oil prices and not only increase the value of thefts, but also incentivize more thefts. And that can be understood through the following example, because, for example, smuggling increases when price between countries increase. And if prices are kept in, say, country A, but prices follow global market prices in neighboring country B, then increased market prices will increase the margins of smuggling from country A and B. And there's significant evidence that that is neat in practice the case. The degree of smuggling and tax evasion is directly linked to cross-border price differentials. However, smuggling and tax evasion are only a subset of the range of potential crimes. Unfortunately, many oil theft crimes occur with violence. In addition, digital crimes, so as recently the US colonial pipeline ransomware attack in 2021 exemplified in diverse methods of oil thieves. There are many ways in which oil theft crimes and crime syndicates established themselves. But even if a theft originates as an opportunity crime, the crime syndicates responsible invariably develop into organized crime. One key reasons for this is that the proceeds of oil theft are so large that it makes it worthwhile to professionalize it. In addition, all theft schemes are often very elaborate and thus therefore require coordination amongst multiple parties and therefore organization. Moreover, the probability of oil theft detection is relatively low and oil theft doesn't rank high amongst other crimes. So consequently, syndicates organize their crime so that they can continue the same thefts again and again. The Shell Bookum refinery theft in Singapore, for example, occurred over a period of 12 years and involved multiple syndicates. In this period, a total of 340,000 tons of gas oil was stolen worth over $150 million US. The Shell Bookum oil theft syndicates involved Shell employees, bunkering companies, fuel traders, banker shipping companies, ship crews, surveying companies, and black market fuel customers. In this example, Shell insiders volunteered willingly and masterminded the crimes. However, in other cases such as in Pemex, Mexico, oil workers are often confronted with extreme violence and kidnapping of their family members to support the cartels in the theft crimes. Oil theft is also a source of public money for terrorist organizations such as ISIS or for political independence organizations. Unfortunately, there are many stories of oil theft. The Benin example shows that the fallout of oil theft on this country's economy, even though Benin has no oil production and very little official fuel imports. Benin has no oil to steal that was not already stolen. However, in 2011, there was a series of pirate attacks on the coast of Benin, mostly targeting oil companies, oil tankers rather, that caused this region to be reclassified as a high risk region by insurance companies. Since shipping companies avoided this area altogether. The Port of Continuum is a major source of income for the Benin government. When port activity declined with 70%, the government lost 28% of its revenue in 2012. Even to date, oil piracy remains the problem also in the Gulf of Guinea, and at least two tankers were attacked in the last few days. Acts of piracy appear to be contagious. As you can see, waves of activity spreading from East Africa to Asia and now increasingly to West Africa. Of the potential piracy targets, oil tankers remain on the top of the list. If it's not to hijack the cargoes, then it is to kidnap their international ship crews. Oil tech is causing great harm to the health and the environment and while all companies are increasingly being held responsible for emissions, there are few activities so environmentally damaging as oil tech. The emissions from artisanal refineries are orders of magnitude higher than from any commercial refiner. The scale of the problem is truly enormous. In 2013, it was reported that more than a thousand of such refineries were destroyed by the authorities in Nigeria, and often the destruction went with increased environmental damage. I conservatively estimated in Nigeria alone, more than 2200,000 barrels of day of stolen crude is processed in such facilities. Nigeria does not stand alone in this. In Russia, these illegal polluting refineries occur also and called Samovars there, like the tea kettles. ISIS use the same chemical process to fund the terrorism. Ground pollution from oil tests from pipeline tests is another key problem. In 2018, Mexican authorities identified more than 12,500 illegal pipeline taps. In Nigeria, pipeline vandalism was reported 21,000 times in the period 2010 to 2014. It is common for these pipelines to explode when locals gather to scoop up part of the spoils. In 2019, a gasoline pipeline that was being tapped in Mexico exploded and killed at least 137 people. The worst recorded event is in Nigeria in 1998, where a similar event caused the death of more than 1,082 people. One of the key observations of my studies is that oil theft very frequently diversifies or originates from the so-called hard crimes. And there are many reasons for this, and I highlight a few. Oil theft is so lucrative that thieves frequently target other thieves for their spoils or to take over their territory. These crime on crime activities are generally extremely violent. The skill set involved in oil theft is very practical and practicable in other crimes. The Mexican kettles, for example, used their skills in burying smuggling tunnels, now also to dig tunnels in the pipelines to invisibly tap them from below ground. Smuggling routes for oil theft are also used for smuggling weapons, narcotics, counterfeit pharmaceuticals, and human trafficking. Very often this occurs on their return journey. Crime syndicates have businesses that are very skilled in risk management and diversifications. And when kettles are being pursued, for example, for drugs, they switch to oil and vice versa. The syndicates know that they are being pursued for a certain type of activity and then flexibly adapt to reduce their exposure in this area and increase their focus in other crime areas that are at that moment less in focus. So you may ask, why is oil theft not giving more priority by the international community? In addition to the recent shows on this slide, I think the impact of oil theft is generally underestimated. First of all, people in the tentative underestimate the scale of global oil thefts. In addition, the wider consequences of oil theft have not been well understood and in particular this aspect I've been focusing on in my work. Oil thefts are often very well hidden and to tackle the problem requires a lot of effort. Note that oil and fuel are not illegal substances contrary to drugs and arms and so someone in possession of truckloads full of fuel is not necessarily breaking the law. Another key piece of the puzzle is that the basic data on oil theft is generally missing. Key questions need answers such as how much oil is being stolen, where is it stolen, how is it stolen and where is it transported to and how are the money flows organized. When oil theft is unchecked, these criminal activities start to penetrate legitimate businesses sometimes to provide active cover to thefts. Often, however, these legitimate companies have no idea that they're handling stolen goods or that they are sponsoring criminal activity that goes well beyond oil theft. The opportunity to make money from oil theft goes much beyond ideology. For example, the largest purchase of oil stolen and processed by ISIS was the Assad regime itself. For example, the oil thefts in the Qatar inventive and well organized there are many opportunities to make it much more difficult to conduct their illegal businesses. These solutions focus on the three areas where answers are most needed, whereas the oil stolen, where and how is it transported and traded, and how are the money flows organized. The purpose of this slide is to show that many solutions can be implemented today. And are the focus of collaboration amongst parties. Other solutions focus on improved regulations or apply exists or the application of existing regulations specifically to target oil theft. Finally, technologies provide an important opportunity, particularly in identifying theft events and the transport of stolen oil. Remote sensing by satellites is one of such technologies. For example, when pirates turn off the ship transponders, also called the AIS after boarding a vessel, it takes six days or more to actually find the vessel. In this time, anything can happen to the crew and a cargo. It should be possible to use satellite technologies to detect ships through its fuel emissions or radar signals, particularly if this is done immediately when the AI signal disappears. Other technologies have proven to be highly effective are chemical traces that can detect if an oil parcel is legitimate or stolen and even where it was stolen. All these opportunities give hope and means to significantly reduce global oil theft. However, the solution does require an effort by multiple parties to collaborate in solving these issues together. With a concerted approach on multiple fronts, can we hold oil theft syndicates to account and bring a hold to their detrimental practices. Here on the slide you see a number of those organizations that in my view are quite critical to work together to provide solutions to this problem. And with that, I conclude my presentation and if you have any questions, please note them down in the chat and we'll follow up after my presentation after the presentations have finished. Thank you. Good. Thank you very much, Etienne. And, as Etienne just said, we will be posting links to the papers and there are many interesting papers on the wider website. We now turn to Giovanna from Baconi University so welcome Giovanna and the floor is yours. Thank you. So, thank you for inviting me and thank you Professor Addison first for the event and owner wider for the organization. So today I'm going to talk about the research that I conducted within the initiative was sponsored by UniWider together with Diego Zambiasi who's a lecturer at Newcastle University. So the title is from offshore oil to offshore finance. And I want to start my presentation just giving you two numbers that give you maybe an idea of what we're talking about. So, in a report by the OECD in 2014, they looked at case of international bribes, and specifically at the sectors in which international bribes or transnational bribes were more frequently observed. Among the different sectors here I showed that two-third of them and these pictures taken from their report where there were four sectors that actually covered the majority or two-thirds of the cases of transnational bribes. But there was one sector and it was extractive where about one-fifth or 19% of all bribes were concentrated. And I think that the extractive sector as maybe the presentation that preceded me already pointed out, actually offers some environment, let's say, for corruption. And then, well, we're not the first to study corruption and offering policy suggestions to how to fight corruption in the case of the extractive sector. As seen among the participants, there's also someone from the Natural Resources Governance Initiative. Well, we carefully read a paper or actually a report that was published by the Natural Resources Governance Initiatives, where they analyze 100 cases of corruption specifically in the moment that happens when there is the awarding of licenses and contracts. In the different cases that were reported there, well, there are 28 that are also analyzed in detail in the report and eight of them. So between one-fourth and a third of these cases, they saw the involvement of shell companies in the scheme of corruption. So what are we after here? So we are asking whether the award of oil and gas licenses does increase corruption or is tied to corruption or it creates an environment where corruption is more likely to happen. Well, as you may guess, this is not going to be an easy task to analyze, especially for economists who are always behind and looking for data, but we're going to show what we will try to do. So let's just start from one of the protagonists of this study. So we're talking about awarding of licensing in oil blocks and corruption. So let's start from the licensing and the oil blocks. Well, as we maybe already know, there are large investments that happen in the sector of oil extraction and oil production. Typically, the moment in which there's going to be the award of contracts or licenses is a peculiar moment because it's a moment that requires a large investment because clearly infrastructures that are required for exploration, production and development are highly costly, but also the returns that may come from these investments are very high and they can also last for a long period. And typically, if we look specifically at the moment of the awarding of oil licenses while this happened through different procedures, and I apologize here for oversimplifying here in the explanation. But typically there are two kinds of procedure one is a direct negotiation. So the potential contractor is going to just ask to the government or knock on the door it's called an open door policy of the government to have a direct negotiation. Or they're going to participate in licensing rounds and licensing rounds are typically some specific moment during which a country decides that are going to award that's going to award a certain number of permits or licenses to oil blocks. And this is also going to be the focus of our study. Typically, the areas or the blocks are, they belong to the government of a country to the country itself. And so it's going to be the government that's going to be directly involved in the awarding of the oil blocks, and we can already see that this is going to involve therefore ministries and public figures in the awarding, and they're going to have a really critical role with high discretion. Then, when we're thinking of licensing, and this is just a little bit of context that I'm going to give in this case, it's going to say that I'm talking about two types of licenses so there are multiple types of licenses but here, let's again apologize for oversimplify but we're going to focus on exploration licenses and production licenses. So what's the difference between the two well typically, let's say that we want to start a company that is going to produce all tomorrow. Well, we may consider to start exploring an oil block where no discovery has already happened. In case we find all there then we're going to maybe apply for a production license. So clearly the exploration is something that has a risk associated with that because we may find or not all. And usually the time of the award or the permission to explore an area last between five and 10 years. So the exploration is something that happens once we already know it that oil is there. Then we can guess that probably an exploration license. It's probably in some cases is a prerequisite to apply for a production license. So suppose that there are there's a moment when the government is going to allow to award production licenses. So oftentimes it's going to only allow people that have already carried out an exploration and had an exploration license so if going back to our example where we're starting our oil company tomorrow production company if we deem that there's going to be a large oil field in a specific area. So we're probably going to try our best bet to get an exploration license first in order to tomorrow in case we find the actual oil field and we're going to be able to have higher chances to gain also a production license. Okay, so going back to our question which was does the award of oil and gas licenses increase corruption. I talked about the awarding moment now and then let's focus on the corruption moment. So we're saying there are large rents that come from these investments. And I apologize I says I heard some notes. Okay, so there are high large rents that come from investment in this specific sector and particularly in the investing in getting a permit for an oil exploration. And I have this question because we were saying that the government is directly involved in the awarding procedure. Well, these are two typical suspects that increase the risk of corruption in the sector. But then, as Etienne was saying before well in the case of oil theft it's going to be hard to find data on oil theft. And also in the case of the awarding of licenses and finding data on corruption of oil licenses is going to be a bit tricky. But here we're building on the work that I mentioned initially. So as I was saying, the natural resources, government initiatives when they study the different cases of corruption occurring the awarding of contracts. This is how Shai companies often play a role in facilitating corruption. And here we can think, and I'm going to exemplify just three cases of why Shai companies could play a role. So, first, if we think that there's going to be an option on an awarding procedure of all permits while there's going to be a bunch of companies probably that are going to apply to gain the award. And it could be the case that among these companies they're going to be companies that are linked to politically exposed people, if not directly owned by politically exposed people. And these are Shai companies that actually do not own the infrastructure and the capabilities to carry out the necessary investment to take advantage of the exploration and production. And they have a vested interest in winning the award, and then in case transferring it to a company that does have the actual capability as infrastructure. So the Shai company here will offer the opportunity to the person that's involved, say the person that's linked to the politically exposed person, or the politician himself to hide his identity. So if a company wins, for example, the permit and then resell it. Another case could be that companies that are participating in the awarding round, they have, they're going to try, for example, to bribe the politicians or to buy the people who are administering the process. So clearly it's going to be easier to hide and to carry out their bargaining procedure behind a secret layer as provided by a Shai company, compared to doing it at like clearly and just directly within the country. So one way, for example, the company could set up a Shai company offshore, direct the money there, and then make as a beneficiary of that company, the politician or someone that's linked to the politician who's involved in the awarding procedure. Ultimately, the same politician himself could be interested in embedding some of the rents that are coming, for example, from the signing bonus of the award. And in this case, he could decide to, he or she could decide to siphon off some of the funds by channeling them to a Shai company that's tied to him or whom, of which he is the ultimate beneficiary. And these are just some examples of how Shai companies could play a role in facilitating corruption in a critical moment as is the moment of the awarding of oil licenses. So just some descriptive evidence of what we do find. So this is just to give you an idea of how we started essentially this project. So these three lines that are being graphed on the picture, each represent a different time series or a different evolution of either in the case of the green dots is the total number of Shai companies that are being incorporated over time. The blue line is the oil price over time. And in that, and the red line or the line at the bottom is the number of awards being needed for exploration permits in this case that are being awarded over time. So I'm showing this picture to show you how the three series actually move together very closely or in other words, when there is like an increase in the number of the awards we observe also and that's the red line at the bottom we also observe an increase in the number of Shai companies that are happening in this in the same period. And the blue line is to say why shall we think also that all price plays a role in this case. Well, if oil price increases while the rent of the investment in the oil sector are probably going to be higher, because then that means that the oil we find, then we can evaluate a higher price. So the same contract or the same license could be more profitable and then it could be more likely that we're willing to get involved in a corruption scheme so in other words when there is oil price increase there is high profit higher profitability from the investment, and that could lead to a higher chance of corruption. So we find actually, and to transfer that graph that I've shown you into some words, while we do find that when there is in the six months around the awarding of an exploration license, we observe an increase of 11% in the number of Shai companies that the beneficiaries are tied to the country or they belong to the country that's awarding the contract. And this association is actually stronger during an album, or in other words, when there is an increase in the price of oil, and we're about to award and a country is about to award an exploration permit. We observe an even further increase in the number of Shai companies that are being incorporated compared to when there is no increase in the price of oil. But then you can ask me about how do you find all of these. For the two protagonists of our story, we were talking about awarding of Shai awarding of exploration and production permit and Shai company. So we obtained data from a business intelligence intelligence provider on where the blocks are placed around the world and when different oil permits are being awarded. So we have been it for exploration or production in the different blocks in the different countries over time. So here we have one protagonist, the other protagonist is the Shai companies. Here we exploit leaked data from the Panama Papers and the Paradise Papers. This was a large investigation that was actually made public between 2016 and 2018 and it was the first time that we were able to observe the identities of the people behind the Shai companies that had been incorporated mainly in the Caribbean, and by essentially Mossack Fonseca and Applebee as two main companies that were involved in the incorporation of Shai companies. So here there is like a caveat that's important, which is that not for all the companies that these journalists actually gain information about we were able to link them to some countries but only for a third of them. But for this, let's say about 240,000 companies that we were able to link to a company what we observe we know when those companies were actually started. So what we do is essentially we look at one country, and we say, let's observe the timing at which a country is awarding exploration and production permits. And let's see what's the dynamic or how many new Shai companies are being incorporated in the period of the awarding so around the six months of the award. So these are the same dynamic in Shai companies to a country that in the same period is not awarding any Shai company, any all exploration or production permit. And let's see whether we observe a different dynamic or a different change in the number of Shai companies that are being incorporated in those countries that are actually awarding the permit, compared to the ones that are not awarding the permit. So you only have a few minutes left. Yes, I should like I should be almost done. So, what we expect is that when a country is awarding a Shai some permits, then we should observe a higher increase in the Shai companies that are being opened by this country compared to a country that is not awarding. And this is even higher when there is an increase in the all of price because it's making the investment even more productive and the rent to extracts are even higher. So, to summarize with the picture what we're doing. We observe here that there are three different bars and three different markers so each bar refers to a different type of permits that's being awarded. So the first bar is saying, do we observe an increase in offshore Shai companies whenever in the six months around the award of any license. The second bar touches the zero, the zero marker and so economists when they observe this they say well it doesn't seem the case because like we cannot distinguish it from a zero. Instead when we look at exploration license and remember that these are the most remunerative ones. Instead of that, in the six months around the awarding of an exploration license there seems to be an 11% increase in the shell in the incorporation of Shai companies, and this does not seem to be the case again in the case of production license, there isn't being that it's still touching the zero. And then given that I'm running out of time, I just want to say that the different numbers in this picture are just saying that when there is an increase in the all price, the increase in Shai companies is even higher compared to when there is no increase in the all price. And the reason being that now a permit is even more remunerative and so maybe there is like a higher incentive to get involved in corruption. To conclude, so we started by saying that the OCD estimated that 19% of transactional bribes are related to the extractive sector. And as also in the video that we started with, we was mentioned this is a problem, and especially in countries that are characterized by low growth. And so this calls for an urgent response of policymakers, and we in particular focus on the role Shai companies plays in fostering corruption. And essentially, this is a call for more transparency both in the people who are behind the Shai companies and as well in the whole procedure of the awarding of licenses. And I stopped here and happy to discuss more later. Thank you very much, Giovanna and the papers are available on the wider website. So now I'd like to turn to Steve Caizzi McGewa. Steve, as I mentioned earlier, is Zika Associates Washington. He was previously acting chief economist and vice president the African Development Bank, and also an IMF staff member, among many other things. So, Steve, over to you. Very, very, very many thanks, Tony, for your very generous introductions. Also, thank you wider for bringing me back again to comment on these very interesting papers I found them extremely interesting. I hope I will do justice to them in less than 10 minutes. So I'm going to be brief. When I look at the papers I had four immediate sort of responses and questions. The first one was that it seems like like natural resources, especially oil are sustaining a group or a couple of corrupt individuals and institutions around the world to bend the rules of the international governance system. And with impunity, by the way, and the question arises, what can we do about it. So that's the first one. The second one was certainly the cases are not confined to the usual suspects that different, the difficult to run places of the world in South Africa. It seems to be all over the global south, and even some countries in the developed world. So our question there is, is our convergence of global thinking. Would that be able to change behavior, you think. The question, or comment that I had was that a research, both of your research is your Vanna, and it can. They seem to suggest that the importance of creating credible, credible institutions and agencies of this strength. But the question is, how would this be established under what kind of formats. I think would be the implications for the environmental concerns that we have that it can brought out, including the movement was next zero. And lastly, in terms of the question that came to my mind was how to put some kind of theoretical or analytical discussion around the topics are very interesting topics that you're discussing. So, in the current policy economy literature. I see a chance. Some of the things you're raising up under the literature read and grievance, which occupied a lot of debate. So that you were on once on one hand you have her politicians are going and say, oh, you know, we, we have this political grievance this, you're not respected. And then when they get in, we are caught up by the greed of grabbing as much of this oil or the gas or whatever. And for Giovanna. Also, there is this whole literature on political finance, as opposed to political economy, just political finance, where a whole lot of this money, by the way, it's packed. You know, the money is packed in all these places in the Caribbean and so on. But in a lot of cases doesn't stay there forever. You should don't know if you have been to Africa, but you should attend some of the, the election campaigns in some of the places they look like American election campaigns and wonder where the money has come from. So these, these, these places are packing places that pack the money there and bring it up to do a lot of political work so political finance is one aspect of it. So, again, very quickly I don't, as I said have much time but when I looked at the papers by a team that to very interesting papers, very nicely interconnected. Something came to my mind and I put a kind of rubric on them and there is that there is method madness. That's what I thought when I read through them. There is this complex structure of natural resource value extraction, the, the, which is always much more complicated in terms of financing in terms of technology than the countries where these things happen. So, then that is used of course in all sorts of ways, but the linkages are incredible because they go up even the UN system. But imagine I mean the UN would be the ultimate arbiter of these things but sometimes also indicated as you point out for the case of food for food for oil in Iraq, and so on. So you have this very complicated technologies are very complicated financing spine posed on very weak institutional structures and the greater structures in the ground. And of course, as you said the risks of the law that if the high high returns. And of course, you have specialization there and protecting that the tough and so on. And I very much like your reference to something called a cappuccino effect, which some of you who read the papers will find very fascinating but essentially what it is is you add a bit of fluff on top, put gas into into the oil, or you put air really into the oil, and the volumes increase, and you sell it. So very, very interesting ways. And when reading through a change purpose I thought of new places like Uganda, which is very excited about its oil production. Interestingly, which is very interesting and effective to the population they're really hoping to cash in. But then you have these extremely long pipelines going to be over 2000 kilometers to the sea from from Uganda. You have, you're going to have all these sophisticated technologies once again. So you really worry. And then of course you have poor civil servants poorly paid civil servants you worry about the implications down the road. The same data for Nigeria, which has had oil for the last 50 years. You have again political ambition. You have grievance, superimposed on greed, and the situation becomes quite complicated. Now turning to Giovanna, again I found your, your, your, your paper very, very interesting. The small rubric I put on top of yours is, if there's nowhere to hide. Why not try home. What I mean by that is that, yes, you might close all these places and shell companies and so on. But the corrupt people find a way and what to my mind is happening today is that the money is being kept in a lot of African countries that I know I'm giving examples not just happen in Africa but I know Africa quite well. And you can find all these five star hotels on on, you know, and houses that cost one million US dollars. I mean, to get a house one million US dollars here in the US would be something. But there's so many houses there, and you wonder how civil servants, I'm able to do this. Okay, so if you can take our money to show companies you can take our money to Switzerland. We might as well do something about it keep it at home. So there's a lot of impunity in the system that is a bit different to to get rid of it will seem so you have real estate booms, five star hotels. The phenomenon of your bands is smaller than mine. People buying all these sophisticated cars. Yes, you get going. But I also asked myself when I was reading your paper about the technology of transferring this money, the cryptocurrencies and so on. The North African technologies, the Western technologies. I'm very very sure that the agencies that security agencies in all these countries know what's happening. And they could probably help. The problem is how can you get them on board, because somebody knows that these things are happening. For example, related to to this. Whenever there was a study that whenever the IMF or the World Bank made a big disbursement for country X in Africa, they would in a very short time be big. Not necessarily of that money, but because money is tangible. There's already enough for an exchange in the system, then you see a transfer of that money going out. So some of these things are known. And the question is, would there be a coalition of the willing to try and stop these activities going forward. Again, thank you very much for what I thought were interesting papers and try to conclude in one or two sentences. Some of the solutions that it can and maybe even you're going to suggest to appeal to some moral economy to the hearts and minds of the people and so on. But my question is what if the whole system is sort of captured, as you have seen in some cases, where the local elites, you see what happens is in some of these places the local elites are still in money. You might see them as crooks, but there's a section of the population that sees them as our sons and daughters. They're bringing the bread home and so on. So how do we deal with that kind of thing that is, again, sort of going around and I would say that our solutions, rightly, that really impact what's happening on the ground. And surprisingly, are given by the example of the new president of Tanzania. She's a lady called President Samir, quite a low key during the last time of the last president who just passed a while ago. She came in and assuming and people thought that she was going to be a walkover because she comes from a small island linked to Tanzania. But very very soon, she has really gone systematically attacking this story, dismantling and so on, a lot of these corruption hotels in the country. The question is, how do such leaders emerge. We don't know, not even the east. Should we just wait for captains miracle to happen like that one. So there is a big pressure don't really have answers to this but those are some of the big questions that came to my mind as I read is very interesting. Thank you so much. Thank you very much, Steve. So, we're now just going to turn to responses from Etienne and Giovana but I'm going to, as you think about your responses just to some of Steve's many points, and we're starting to run out of time. The question that's come up in the chat and there are quite a lot of comments in the chat is, is how much should we be relying on voluntary practices by the companies. How much should we be looking to more stricter regulation. And you know who's going to be responsible for overseeing that. And one specific question for Etienne that that came up was, if default emission penalties are assessed on oil companies etienne default emissions penalties are assessed on oil companies will this change incentives towards or against illegal activity. Okay, so I'd like to hand over now to Etienne for a brief response and then to give honor. Thank you. Yeah, and I'm also trying to maintain to respond to some of the questions that have come in and then some of the overlap between Giovana's and my presentation, I think, forward to summarize, I would say oil theft and corruption is a business. And that's why it links to all price I said the same thing in my presentation if all price goes up. The old hat goes up and Giovana shows the, the corruption goes up and that clearly that's a business response to an external driver. Let that be no mistake that the organizations and companies that are behind these activities know very well what they're doing. And they're excellent in managing risks and extremely clever and finding new business methods to continue. What is a very lucrative kind of kind of deal it's not a one off it's it's clearly a business proposition. I want to quickly react to one of the questions that came in. This is a quite difficult one and I described that in my report in quite a bit of detail is the whole thing about moral economy that there was just raised as well. Like the government cannot take care of distribution of energy access for its people then you shouldn't be surprised that if say other organizations illegal organizations will do it for you and give the people what they need. I understand the rationale but still I think it's a flawed argument. This is probably the biggest negative of oil theft and corruption practices that actually in the minds legitimate governments in the long run, by giving handouts and involving people in theft and corrupt practices as part of the scheme. And ultimately it doesn't help the society at all. And of course the government has a job to do to provide energy access to its people, but through these practices actually it's, it's compromised in doing so. So it's a bit of cause and effect but I think the root cause of the problem is the theft of the government. Okay, thank you very much, Etienne. So, give on briefly would you like to respond to. Yes, these made or anything that's come up. Yeah, definitely so thanks again like a, especially thank you when some of the questions that you raise are probably some million dollar questions as well. But if I want to give like my contribution so I was actually thinking how to translate these into practical suggestions. And I think that there are some progress so maybe we cannot solve it in one day but there is some progress that can be done. So for example, going back to the specific case of the awarding of our licenses well, as I was saying there are some companies that are applying and they don't have the infrastructure capabilities. So we should first impose or maybe it should be mandatory that the companies that participate do have the requirements in terms of infrastructure and capital to carry out. So we are not linked to politically exposed persons, but then going back to the question of the chat shall we rely on the companies themselves to provide these well no probably this is a role that must be taken by super partners organization and international organizations. As I mentioned before there is already the natural resource governance institution that is already initiative that's already involved in this, and they have been also the, for example in the case of all profits there are the 80 standards that have been developed so the World Bank made some disbursement of loans on countries, meeting some standards in the reporting of their all proceeds and they are all profits. So similar standards could be implemented also in the awarding of all permits. I would say, for example, again, either for the disbursement of international aid of World Bank aid, while this is going to be dispersed as long as the country also meets some requirements in terms of standardization of the process and in the awarding procedures. And finally, probably just to summarize all my discussion the easiest anecdote to all these is transparency so it's true as you were saying that the shy companies are sometimes just a stepping stone to then bring the money back and my question again is, do we know who are the owners of the five star hotel or our child companies behind them, because maybe if we go and have an opportunity to check who's behind them, then we may maybe can also make progress in terms of fighting corruption and the very last point is, who shall we expect to do this? Well, another point that I think it's relevant is that in the way we measure corruption, typically we ask for example people whether they had to pay someone to get their procedure done. It's probably also time to get people to make people aware or to become all of us aware of the fact that corruption is not just paying someone to get an authorization for something sometimes corruption is also someone that is like a government ministry and is siphoning off money abroad. So in the measure way we measure corruption and I'm talking about corruption perception index we also as people as grassroots as population must become aware of the fact that corruption is it has different shapes and some of them are also shared companies and siphoning money to tax savings. Thank you very much, Gio Varna. So, as I said at the very outset of the webinar, this webinar has been brought to you under the wider DRM program, and this particular webinar reflects on two themes, extractives for development, what the theme that I've been leading and illicit financial flows that Professor Fintharp of Copenhagen University has been leading. So do visit our website, there's a lot of material up there for your interest. It remains for me to thank very much our speakers, Etienne Romsen, Gio Varna, Marco Longo, and Steve Casey McGewar for their very interesting and stimulating presentations, I think you'll go away thinking this is a very important issue, which has been under emphasised by the global community. There will be further webinars in this series, so do look out for them on the wider website, or on social media. And I'd like to thank wider and the wider staff, Yuta and Anna for organising this meeting, the practicalities. So, thank you wherever you are in the world. Thank you for coming. Thank you for your participation. Thank you.