19 Mar Official meeting with Kosovo’s Independent Commission for Mines and Minerals (KICMM)
On 9 March, 2018, the Director of the AlbEITI Secretariat, Ardit Kamberi, visited Kosovo’s Independent Commission for Mines and Minerals (ICMM), with a view to enhancing cooperation and discuss Kosovos’s membership proccedures in EITI.
Mr.Kamberi met with the Chairman of ICMM Board, Musa Shabani, ICMM Chief Inspector, Fatmir Gerguri, and members of the ICMM Board.
During the meeting, Kamberi presented the multifaceted advantages associated with the process of membership in the EITI Coalition made up of 51 member countries, which promotes transparency, good governance, and accountability in the oil, gas, mining and energy sectors.
At the international level, the EITI Reporting contains detailed information on extractive industry revenues, amounting to US $ 2.4 trillion, and data monitoring covering a total of 332 fiscal years for all EITI countries.
Albania became an EITI member in 2013 and has since managed to publish 8 EITI Reports covering the fiscal years from 2009 to 2016. The 2016 EITI report was published on 15 February, 2018.
The Director of AlbEITI underlined Albania’s success in completing the Validation Process for 2017 with the EITI Board assessing the country in its official report as having achieved meaningful progress in implementing the EITI.
During the meeting, Mr. Kamberi also pointed out the priorities of the Albanian Secretariat for 2018, which include: promoting Transparency and disclosing revenue from extractive industries, in order to inform the general public and foster constructive debate on the rational use of these revenues to ensure sustainable development and economic growth; disclosing Beneficial Ownership of the companies in extractive industries; Albania’s involvement in the pilot project on commodity trading; social and environmental impacts in the areas where extractive industries operate; monitoring the benefits in local ommunities living in mining areas from the collection of mining royalties.
Mr. Kamberi also provided a detailed overview of the procedures and institutional steps that a country should undertake in order to become an EITI candidate and comply with the EITI Guide of the International Secretariat, and underlined the requirements to the sign-up process.
The EITI National Secretariat has kept up regular communication and has cooperated with various government bodies and civil society organizations in Kosovo, which have shown their interest in gaining knowlodge about the advantages of implementing the EITI standard during the joint meetings organized in June 2016, October 2016, and April 2017.
During the meeting, the Chairman of the ICMM Board, Mr. Shabani, draw attention to the natural potentials, in particular of the mining sector in the Republic of Kosovo, and placed the emphasis on the transparency and good governance in the use of natural resources in Kosovo.
While commending Albania’s status and active role in the EITI process, Mr. Shabani also added that he highly esteems the efforts of the AlbEITI Secretariat to cooperate and facilitate the process of Kosovo’s membership in Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative.
Mr. Shabani said that the intense cooperation with governemnt structures, mainly with the Ministry of Economic Development, proves that the EITI membership process has benn and continues to be one of the main political objectives of the government of Kosovo.
ICMM Chief Inspector, Mr. Gerguri, noted Kosovo’s significant progress in disclosing information related to Kosovo’s mining sector, including detailed information on mining permits and revenues generated by this sector.
While informing the participants in the meeting on the tasks of ICMM as an entity under the authority of the Assembly of the Republic of Kosovo, Mr. Gerguri also placed emphasis on the importance of monitoring, controlling and regulating the extractive sector in Kosovo, and at the same time ensuring transparency as an essential element in this process.
At the end of the meeting, the parties expressed once again their mutual interest in facilitating the process of Kosovo’s membership in EITI and commitment to coordinate activities and cooperate with the Ministry of Economic Development in order to prepare a detailed agenda on the specific steps to accelerate Kosovo’s membership in this Global Initiative, as one of the advantages for the European integration process of Kosovo.