An active civil society and a free press are key to guarding against public corruption in the development of the oil and gas industry, according to American legal expert Vicky McPherson.
“The most important thing to acknowledge about corruption is that you can have all the laws and regulations in place but if you don’t have the leadership and the personal conviction, quite frankly, to not steal from the public coffers, none of this matters. That is why I want to underscore the role of civil society and free press in all of this,” McPherson told an oil and gas symposium at the Pegasus Hotel yesterday.
The symposium, hosted by the African Business Roundtable and facilitated by the Caribbean Institute of Forensic Accounting (CIFA) in collaboration with the Guyana Oil and Gas Association(GOGA), yesterday began a two day conference under the theme “Public Corruption and the Curse of Oil: Lessons from Developing Countries.”
