2017 has been a busy year for our countries. Almost half have completed Validation, we have seen unparalleled political commitments on beneficial ownership transparency and most are accelerating the process of mainstreaming transparency into government and company systems.

We welcomed three countries to our family in 2017 –  Guyana, Mexico and Suriname. We also saw three countries withdraw from EITI implementation, Azerbaijan, Niger and the United States.

2017 was a busy year in the EITI world. In total, 217 articles were published including blog and news items. We also held three Board meetings, a global beneficial ownership conference, another "-papers"-leak, and over 20 Validations have generated a lot of traffic to our website. We have had almost 800,000 page views this year, and over 140 000 users. The Standard was downloaded 3,181 times this year,

In 2015, commodity trading practices in Indonesia were thrown into crisis when fraudulent practices involving Petral, the trading arm of state-owned petroleum company Pertamina were uncovered. The fraud involved overpricing of commodities which led Pertamina to pay imports at almost three times their real value, as well as deviating from proper bidding processes to limit competition and favour a few select traders.

Delegates of thirteen French-speaking African countries, which are implementing the EITI, offered examples of the results and impact of the EITI in their respective countries

As pointed out at the opening ceremony of the meeting by Eddie Rich, Deputy Director of the EITI International Secretariat: "The countries of French-speaking Africa have made much progress on transparency". He recalled that African countries were among the first to join the EITI,