Today we have published a new white paper entitled "Reform vs. Status Quo: The Campaign Against Nasir El-Rufai and the Degeneration of Progress in Nigeria."

You can download a full copy of the paper here - below is my preface and the executive summary.

PREFACE FROM THE AUTHORI made one of my first trips to Lagos, Nigeria, as an overly curious teenage student from Canada in the 1970s. The experience, while both sad and beautiful, was powerfully motivating to me in my future career in international law, not least for the impressive people I met there - including a family which had practically adopted me into their home. I believed then as I believe now that no nation which contains such brilliant human resources should ever be consigned by fate to underdevelopment. In other ...

We’ve all heard a lot about the Canadian oil sands and how a modern-day oil boom is taking place in the forests of northern Alberta.
This is oil that begins not with holes drilled deep underground, but rather as aromatic clay and sand clawed out of the ground by giant backhoes and hauled in huge dump trucks to nearby refineries….

Wersquo;ve all heard a lot about the Canadian oil sands and how a modern-day oil boom is taking place in the forests of northern Alberta. This is oil that begins not with holes drilled deep underground, but rather as aromatic clay and sand clawed out of the ground by giant backhoes and hauled in huge dump trucks to nearby refineries. The oil sands in the Fort McMurray region give Canada the second-largest reserves in the world after Saudi Arabia -- some estimate that more than 170 billion barrels could be recovered with existing technology. Itrsquo;s may be hard to picture this process. A series of photos from National Geographic provide a good look at the oil sands and the positive and negative impacts of their development. The size of and demand for the resource ensure that the oil sands will be developed on a large scale. For Canada, the challenge is to strike that ...

Wersquo;ve all heard a lot about the Canadian oil sands and how a modern-day oil boom is taking place in the forests of northern Alberta. This is oil that begins not with holes drilled deep underground, but rather as aromatic clay and sand clawed out of the ground by giant backhoes and hauled in huge dump trucks to nearby refineries. The oil sands in the Fort McMurray region give Canada the second-largest reserves in the world after Saudi Arabia -- some estimate that more than 170 billion barrels could be recovered with existing technology. Itrsquo;s may be hard to picture this process. A series of photos from National Geographic provide a good look at the oil sands and the positive and negative impacts of their development. The size of and demand for the resource ensure that the oil sands will be developed on a large scale. For Canada, the challenge is to strike that ...

Recently, I had the unique opportunity to tour two different oil sands operations near Fort McMurray, in northern Alberta. I saw a massive open-pit oil sands mine, and the associated reclamation effort, operated by Syncrude Canada Ltd. I also visited an in situ oil sands recovery project called Surmont, operated by ConocoPhillips (NYSE:COP).

The trip was sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute (API), which paid for the airfare and accommodations. Managers at both Syncrude and ConocoPhillips granted me access to any parts of their operations I wanted to see (within allowances for safety). And everyone answered any and all questions I asked.

Post-trip, I have complete editorial freedom to write about what I saw and learned. And I learned a lot. So this is Part I of a two-part series. Watch for Part II.

The Past and Future of Oil and Oil Sands

The first thing that struck me about visiting

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An editorial in The New York Times focuses on President Dmitry Medvedev's increasingly visible silence on human rights issues such as the second trial of Mikhail Khodorkovsky:

Nor has he reacted to the farcical new charges against Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev, the former top officers of the dismembered Yukos oil company who were arrested in 2003.

The charges then were tax evasion; now they have been expanded to the theft of Yukos's entire oil production. If the first trials at least could have been explained as a political reckoning for a powerful and ambitious oligarch, the new ones are show, intended only to keep Mr. Khodorkovsky and his colleague in prison forever. "Power: carry out your laws," Mr. Khodorkovsky demanded at the start of the trial.

If Mr. Medvedev really abhors "legal nihilism," he must see that this

...

As governments around the world fight rising unemployment, falling exports and bank credit crunch, and several central banks are facing liquidity traps, many are turning to restrictions that privilege national producers. These populist measures attempt to minimize growth impact, social unrest and pain from the credit crunch that poses a risk to several ruling governments, especially those facing elections soon. Furthermore, some officials hope that such restrictions will reduce the leakage of the scarce funds used in bank bailouts and fiscal stimulus to other countries.

But as history shows, the impacts of trade protectionism on exports and job creation if any are small in the short-term and instead may lead to global retaliation, and in the long-term result in inefficient allocation of labor and capital and trade distortions, affecting potential

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“Peak oil, my a**. I’ve got hundreds of millions of barrels of the stuff in the Gulf [of Mexico]. We know where the oil is…we just can’t get to it. I can’t even get a contractor that can do the work to take my call.” That’s what an oil company executive told me (with a Texas drawl and an arm around my shoulder for balance) a little over three years ago. At the time oil was $60. There was no telling how high it could go. The aged scotch was flowing in celebration of good times - and even better times to come. The conference was in New York City, but a few hundred oilmen from across the country came to celebrate, swap stories, and complain. About 9 out of 10 people in the room were wearing a three-piece suit and cowboy boot combination. Your editor ...

Broadcasters don’t stop transmitting television programs during a recession. That’s why Tom Bulford says ContentFilm (LON:CFL) could be a great penny stock for this downturn. The company has a low-risk business model and is trading at a huge discount today. But Tom says investors need to watch out for a £9 million preferred shares liability due in March 2009.

This from Fleet Street Invest:

‘Welcome to the new West! Where overnight oil millionaires with Porsches and over-the-top mansions butt up against the salt-of-the earth cattle and rodeo country. It’s a place where fortunes are made in the tar sands at noon and lost on the poker tables at night.’

Phew! I don’t think we’re talking about Ilfracombe! More like Dallas, I should say. And this is indeed the promotion for a television series called The Wild Roses, described as an ‘epic clash

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"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way"TolstoyPresident Dmitry Medvedev’s recent decision to inject $20 billion into Russia’s flagging stock markets – which were down nearly 50% from last May at the time - together with the $60 billion odd dollars of support injected into its groggy banking system served to draw attention to the fact that it wasn't only “over there” on the other side of the Atlantic that the financial turmoil was busy raging. This simple point was further emphasised, if need there was for it, by the fact that both the Russian bourses – the MICEX and the ruble denominated RTS - were only working on a “now you see me now you don't basis” for the best part of a week in mid September. Stealing an idea from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, every financial boom is (boringly) the same, but every financial crisis is different in its own special (and intriguing) way. What just happened in Russia merely serves to prove Tolstoy’s point.