Victor Hart, Chair of the Trinidad and Tobago Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (TTEITI), has been elected to the EITI International board of directors for the Americas and Europe.
Hart’s election was by a wide margin over candidates from Colombia, Peru, Honduras and Albania for a place on the 2016-19 EITI Board. Newly elected members will be announced at the 7th EITI Global Conference in Peru later this month, attended by a Trinidad and Tobago delegation.
Commenting on the result, Hart said, “I intend to use my position on the board to promote the TTEITI brand as well as the innovations we have introduced to EITI implementation. If our pioneering ideas are adopted, they could change for the better how the EITI is implemented worldwide.”
Since 2010, under Hart’s leadership, Trinidad and Tobago has been at the forefront of several progressive EITI implementation strategies. Hart pledged his continued advocacy for Trinidad and Tobago to be the EITI Champion for the Caricom region.
Hart said: “The EITI Is about protecting the people’s patrimony. Therefore, I will advance ideas to assist small countries rich in natural resources, like our CARICOM partners, in benefitting from EITI implementation.”
In the last two months TTEITI, in partnership with UWI and the British High Commission, has held workshops in Jamaica, Suriname and Guyana to promote the EITI aims of transparency, accountability and improved revenue management in those countries’ extractive sectors. These sectors are mainly oil, gas and mining for minerals, but can also include forestry and fishing industries. The series of regional workshops will end with a Regional Symposium in Guyana on 4 March.
In this country, the TTEITI engages in continual community outreach events to promote its annual EITI Reports, the most recent of which can be found at www.tteiti.org.tt.
A quantity surveyor and project manager by profession (now retired), Hart served on the Commission of Enquiry into alleged corruption in the Piarco Airport project. This led to his commitment to devote his remaining years to reducing the opportunities for corruption in the Nation’s public and private sectors.
He was a director of the Trinidad and Tobago Transparency Institute (Transparency) for five years, during which he served as director, treasurer and chair for three years. Transparency’s 14 years of advocacy with other civil society groups for public sector procurement reform bore fruit in January 2015 when the Public Procurement and Disposal of Public Property Act 2015 was passed in Parliament. Hart served on the Cabinet-appointed Oversight Committee for Public Procurement that guided the implementation of the Act, which should become fully operational in 2016.
Victor Hart was awarded the Hummingbird Medal, Silver, at Trinidad and Tobago’s Independence anniversary celebrations on 31 August 2015. This national award is bestowed on persons in the private or public sector who have rendered loyal and devoted service in their respective fields for the benefit or prestige of the community and the Nation.
The EITI is a global standard for ensuring transparency of payments from natural resources providing transparency and accountability in the extractive sectors (oil, gas and mining) through the annual publication of payments made by companies to governments, independently audited and reconciled with government’s declared receipts. Established in 2003, the EITI is currently being implemented by a coalition of governments, companies and civil society organisations in 49 countries around the world rich in natural resources.