Consultant - Mapping Developing Country Crude Oil and Fuel Sales

Terms of Reference

Summary

• The Berne Declaration, the Revenue Watch Institute and SWISSAID seek a consultant to assist with a joint research project about the sale of crude oil and the purchase of petroleum products by developing country governments.
• The research will involve data collection from diverse sources including commodity trading industry reports, media accounts, and reports produced by government agencies and international organizations, among others.
• The consultant will need a strong understanding of the oil industry, with some familiarity with commodity trading in particular, and excellent research skills.

Background

The sale and purchase of petroleum are relative blind-spots in the global movement to improve extractive industry transparency and governance. For many oil producing countries, this is a major oversight: Yemen, Gabon, Cameroon, Congo-Brazzaville, Nigeria, Azerbaijan, Iraq and others all earn over half of their oil revenues through government crude sales. Likewise, importing fuel represents one of the largest drains on public funds in many developing countries. Often, these transactions are conducted with limited transparency or oversight, and instances of corruption have arisen.

Several developments have led to a nascent but growing interest in addressing these physical petroleum transactions. For example, in Switzerland, home to many commodity trading companies, the issue is receiving growing attention from the public and the government. At the international level, the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) has incorporated these transactions in their revised reporting requirements. Supporting these and other advances requires a better understanding of how the transactions take place: their size, the companies involved, the procurement systems used, etc.

To address this knowledge gap, three NGOs - the Berne Declaration, the Revenue Watch Institute and SWISSAID - will work together to produce a map of developing country crude sales and fuel purchases. The mapping effort will focus on identifying the size of the sales and the buying/selling companies involved, but will also seek to collect preliminary data on the methods for selecting the buyer/seller and for setting the sale price and the types of contractual agreements involved.

Deliverables and timeline

The consultants will collect the data needed to populate the mapping.

For around 30 developing country oil producers, the consultant will examine crude sales and fuel purchases during the 2011-2013 period. For each country, they will seek to identify:

• whether any such sales took place, the basic system for their administration (agency in charge, etc.)
• the total quantity of volumes sold/purchased
• the companies that bought the crude or sold the fuel
• as much company-specific data as possible about the volumes purchased/sold and amounts paid/received
• the system used to set the price of the sale, and to select the buying/selling company and the contractual agreements involved.

The consultant will also be called upon to help analyze the data, working with colleagues from the hiring organizations to draw out noteworthy trends and findings.

The researcher will spend roughly 30 days on the project. No travel is envisioned.

The following timeline is indicative, and could be adjusted to a limited degree based on researcher availability:

By January 20, 2013 - Work with the hiring organizations to finalize the data collection template and selection of countries.

By February 20, 2014 - Submission of initial data for the selected countries.

By March 5, 2014 - Submission of final data set, having made revisions in response to feedback from hiring organization. Submission of contributions to the data analysis and identification of key findings.

Qualifications:

• Strong oil industry expertise, including ideally crude oil trading.
• Familiarity with oil industry data sources.
• Excellent and proven research and data management skills.

To Apply:

Please email CV and a cover letter to Alexandra Gillies, Head of Governance at the Revenue Watch Institute (agillies@revenuewatch.org), and Urs Rybi, Policy Analyst at the Berne Declaration (urs.rybi@evb.ch), with the subject line OIL TRADING CONSULTANT.

Please respond as soon as possible, and before 17 January 2013.