The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) approved on Wednesday in a 3-2 vote a final rule on resource extraction disclosures, relaxing the requirements for oil and mining companies to report payments made to foreign governments. The final rule, part of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, is the third version of the rule for Section 1504 of the Dodd-Frank act. The final rule doesn’t require oil and mining companies to disclose payments on a contract-by-contract basis, only aggregate amounts of payments per country in most cases. The first version of the rule from 2012 was defeated in court by the American Petroleum Institute (API), while a revised rule was rejected by the House in 2017. Now the final rule passed with three to two votes, with all three Republican commissioners at SEC voting for the 2020 version with relaxed reporting rules, and the two […]