Baker Hostetler Business Associate Stephen T. Olson and Litigation Associate Carlos Ramos-Mrosovsky travelled to the West African country of Ghana earlier in October to advise on legal issues concerning the management of that country’s newfound oil wealth. Olson and Ramos-Mrosovsky travelled at the invitation of Oxfam America, a leading international development organization and client of Ramos-Mrosovsky’s.
Ghana has little experience to draw upon in managing offshore petroleum reserves estimated at five billion barrels of oil. Ghana also grapples with corruption, which may grow worse if revenues from oil and gas are not managed within a transparent regulatory framework.
Olson and Ramos-Mrosovsky addressed both of these challenges. In high-level meetings with the Ghanaian Ministry of Energy, the Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee of the Parliament of Ghana, the Parliamentary Committee on Mines & Energy, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the U.S. Agency for International Development, as well as Ghanaian civil society organizations and think tanks, Olson explained the implications of Ghana’s existing concession agreements with foreign oil companies and advised on how Ghana—where more than half the population lives on less than two dollars a day—might negotiate more favorable terms in future agreements now that the country has a production history and proven reserves.
Ramos-Mrosovsky analyzed shortcomings in Ghana’s new Petroleum Revenue Management Act and presented draft “legislative instruments” to flesh out and implement anti-corruption and public accountability provisions in the laws governing Ghana’s management of oil and gas revenues. Ghanaian civil society organizations will present these drafts to Ghana’s Parliament and Ministry of Finance in response to the government’s requests for proposed regulatory language.
The firm’s work on oil and gas and accountability issues in Ghana advances development and the rule of law, showcases Baker Hostetler’s international capabilities, and develops contacts in a country that, thanks to the discovery of commercial quantities of oil in 2007, now ranks as the world’s fastest-growing economy.
