This is my speech from the Houston World Affairs Council on May 19, 2008 – covering the comparative investment environments of Venezuela and Nigeria, the rise of state-owned energy companies, the decline of Washington’s soft power, and the new competition gap facing investors.
The year 1995 was very tragic for Nigeria: after years of starvation and exploitation, the ethnic minority in Ogoniland, an area rich in oil and gas, began mounting a peaceful civil society movement to demand a greater share of the oil wealth to fund infrastructure in their impoverished communities. Led by the political activist Ken [...]
Robert Amsterdam was profiled in the new issue of Upstream magazine, an energy trade magazine, on how international energy companies can and should defend their rights in resource nationalist market conditions. Download the full PDF of the article here.
Earlier this week, I gave a short presentation in London on the legal and political remedies available for foreign investors to protect their assets in emerging markets undergoing resource nationalism trends. In coming weeks, I will be doing similar workshops in Stockholm and Dubai, and I thought it might be helpful to post the “checklist” [...]
It has become shorthand for journalists to describe Russia as “resurgent” and dramatically “more powerful” than it was in the year 2000. We generally accept this fact because of its impressive average economic growth of 6.4% over the past five years, swelling the GDP to $1.6 trillion. We also are led to this conclusion [...]
Two reports from the Wall Street Journal caught my eye today – the first one being that the U.S. Energy Information Administration is now saying that it expects $100 a barrel oil to be the norm for 2008 – changing expectations from just three months ago that prices would average $87 a barrel. The EIA [...]
Over on my Russia-focused blog, I have been doing some writing on the case of TNK-BP, an energy joint venture operating in Russia, which has recently come under extraordinary pressure from the state to sell a controlling stake to the state-owned energy company. In many ways, we have an ideal case study of corporate foreign [...]
Gwyn Morgan, the retired founding CEO of EnCana, has a great article in the Globe and Mail today about the shifting balance of power in the global economy posed by both petro dollars and trade flows. The rise of sovereign wealth funds is provoking calls for greater transparency.
Here’s good one in the Washington Post – they’ve caught on to this whole “sovereign wealth thing” caused by high oil prices. It’s nice, well reported piece, although I don’t think that Germany was “alarmed” over Russia’s pipeline acquisitions – they helped them complete the transactions. Oil and Trade Gains Make Major Investors Of Developing [...]
