Our stakeholder priorities

At the beginning of 2010 we committed to reviewing and assessing the external initiatives to which Tullow could sign up. We have continued to debate, both publicly and privately, the relative merits of these general sustainability initiatives, disclosure initiatives, socially responsible investment (SRI) indices as well as industry and issue-specific initiatives.

This is an ongoing discussion in the context of a set of key external drivers that influence our decision-making. These include:

• The rapidly growing transparency agenda, particularly of governments and companies;
• An increased focus on corruption due to the importance of emerging markets and important legislative developments such as the UK Bribery Act;
• The growing links between sustainability initiatives; and
• The importance of addressing what is of most concern to our stakeholders, at both national and international levels.

In May 2011, Tullow formally became a corporate supporter of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), as we believe it is aligned with our positions on transparency, sustainability and anti-corruption and our overarching goal of creating shared prosperity in the countries in which we operate.

Most commonly, petroleum agreements (or production sharing agreements) between a company and a host government remain confidential at the request of the host government for commercial reasons. We respect the wishes of our host governments, but take the position that should a government wish to make these agreements public, we would fully support them in doing so.

We published our petroleum agreements for the Deep Water Tano Contract Area and the West Cape Three Points Contract Area in May 2011, at the request of, and with the approval of, the Government of Ghana. They can be found on our dedicated Tullow Oil Ghana website.