| |
Four G8 Compact Countries Announce Their Plans to Combat Corruption Under Secretary for Economic, Business, and Agricultural Affairs Alan P. Larson; Assistant Secretary for Economic Affairs E. Anthony Wayne, and Government Representatives from Georgia, Nicaragua, Nigeria And Peru Foreign Press Center Briefing Washington, DC October 5, 20043:15 P.M. Edt
MR. DENIG: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Washington Foreign Press Center. As you know, corruption is a poison that eats at the very insides of democracies, so combating corruption throughout the world is something that is very essential if we are to maintain the health of our democracies.
So we are very pleased today to be able to present to you a briefing today about four G-8 compact countries that will be announcing their plans to combat corruption in their countries. Leading off the discussion today is Under Secretary of State for Economic, Business, and Agricultural Affairs Alan Larson. Following his opening presentation providing a context, we have representatives from the governments who are engaging in this compact. We have, first of all, next to Mr. Larson, from Georgia the First Deputy Minister of Justice Ekaterine Gureshidze. From Nicaragua we have the Ambassador to the United States, His Excellency Salvador Stadthagen. We are hoping that the Nigerian representative will be able to join us; it is their Minister of Finance, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala. And from Peru we welcome Ms. Ana Rosa Valdivieso, Advisor to Prime Minister Carlos Ferrero. And finally, at the conclusion of those presentations, our Assistant Secretary of State for Economic Affairs Tony Wayne will wrap that together and also make some comments about the practical implementation. After the presentations, our briefers will be very happy to take your questions.
And so now I give the floor to Under Secretary Al Larson.
UNDER SECRETARY LARSON: Good afternoon. We have just completed a two-day foreign affairs meeting of the G-8 under the presidency of the United States and we have the great honor to announce some very important progress in moving forward with compacts to promote transparency and to fight corruption in the four countries that were just mentioned.
What's important about this initiative is that these countries recognize that fighting corruption is something that's fundamentally in the interests of their countries and fundamentally related to their democracies and their development programs. And you'll hear from them in a moment.
The G-8 countries, for their part, recognize that we have to be a part of the solution and we've been working on this problem for some time. In the Sea Island document that President Bush led other leaders to accept, we agreed that we were going to push forward with the implementation of the United Nations Convention Against Corruption; we agreed that we would provide practical help to countries that are trying to detect and repatriate to their countries assets that were wrongfully taken away during periods of bad leadership and bad governance; we agreed that we would make sure that our countries were not a safe haven for those types of leaders; we agreed that we would redouble our efforts to enforce the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention so that our businesses would not be part of a process of contributing to corruption in countries.
I am very, very pleased that, having announced those measures, we also were able at Sea Island to announce our willingness to work in a very specific way, in partnership with the four countries that are represented here today. Since Sea Island, a meeting that took place in June, we have been working on practical implementation steps. You'll hear more about that in a few moments.
The key point here is that these are countries that are walking a very difficult road of trying to introduce more transparency and more integrity into their government processes, and we in the G-8 are determined to walk that path with them and help provide the political support and the technical assistance that can help them be successful.
So we are very proud of what these countries have done, and I would just close in noting that the Finance Minister of Nigeria is just arriving. She will be seated right there and she will be one of the presenters who will tell a story from her own standpoint, from the standpoint of each of these countries, about why this fight is so important to them.
I'll now turn it over to our representative from the Government of Georgia.
MS. GURESHIDZE: Thank you. Good afternoon. As you already all know, we had the change of government, change of power, in Georgia in November last year, and after this important turn point in our country the government is absolutely committed to reform the society. And to reform the society, we have to fight the corruption which, unfortunately, has spread to wider society. And we have to fight the corruption because it drains our economy, it drains our society, and we have to do everything to eradicate it.
And for this, the assistance from G-8 and from international organizations is very important for us. That's why I'm very happy, I'm very pleased to be here, and I want to sincerely thank you, the representatives of G-8, for giving us this opportunity.
We had a very good working meeting yesterday. We basically discussed the initiatives that the Georgian Government has already implemented or is in the process of implementation. But more importantly, we introduced our working plan, which is basically a working document consolidating our future initiatives on the way to fight corruption.
We discussed this plan in detail and I'm very pleased to tell you that we moved just from general talks to more practical steps, and by the end of -- we have agreed that by the end of this year we will come up with more specifics on the working plan and to say more and discuss how to better use the technical assistance and the immense political support we will be getting from G-8 and from international financial institutions.
So that's very briefly about our work that we did yesterday. And again, I want to thank the representatives for G-8. Thank you.
MR. DENIG: Thank you, Minister. We'll now hear from the Nicaraguan Ambassador, Mr. Stadthagen.
AMBASSADOR STADTHAGEN: Secretary Larson, Secretary Wayne, members of the press, for me it's a pleasure to be here.
President Bolanos has started an epic fight against corruption. Our former president of Nicaragua, Mr. Arnoldo Aleman, is in jail. He's the only president in Latin America right now to have either not gone into golden exile or is enjoying the fruits of his pilferage, but he is, you know, facing justice.
But as our President has said it, fighting corruption goes beyond just frying big fish. Really, we need to work with the institutions in the country, work with the law, and take a number of initiatives in the country that are as simple as supporting the attorney generals office to be able to go after the monies that we have found that are deposited around the world, or to proceed with the cases in court. It goes beyond that.
In our particular case, it has to go to the root of some of the problems, including the total reform or substantial reform of the judicial system. It means placing information available to the citizens. At this point, our budgets and the execution of those budgets, and also the foreign assistance, have been placed in the Internet. It's making, you know, information available to citizens and it's monitoring and elevating, it's reinforcing institutions from, as I said, the attorney generals office is essential. At this point, our attorney generals office only has a couple of lawyers to work with. I mean, it's facing a monumental amount of work with the unprecedented corruption that we found when the present government of President Bolanos took power in 2002.
The Government of Nicaragua is strongly committed to fighting corruption. Accordingly, transparency is a key element of justice and economic growth. We see, you know, a very strong link between economic growth and, of course, transparency. We cannot foresee the levels of investment we need to palliate our underemployment and unemployment without foreign investment. And for all these, we need to have a very transparent government. We really need to fight against corruption.
For years, Nicaragua has been afflicted by corruption. It's a part of our political culture. Our president right now is going against the political culture of the country and that's a very difficult thing. You go to the roots of the problem. And we could not foresee doing this without the help of the international community. The international community has come to the help of President Bolanos in many ways and this new initiative of the G-8, an initiative that we requested to be part of will be essential to the triumph of this bold course of action that our President has decided to take.
As I say, it's going to the roots. It's going to straight to trying to change the political culture of the country, and hopefully our example will help Latin America and will help the developing world. The international community has to assure that our efforts are, you know, take effect. And we believe that the G-8 initiative will help us greatly in this direction.
Thank you very much.
MR. DENIG: Thank you very much, Mr. Ambassador. We'll hear now from the Nigerian Minister of Finance, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala.
DR. OKONJO-IWEALA: Thank you very much, and thanks to Under Secretary Larson and the G-8 for the initiative.
As you know, Nigeria has confronted and long been seen as a country with a significant corruption problem and, in fact, this is so damaging in terms of our image and in terms of our development that we have confronted it squarely and decided that this must be a fundamental pillar of a new reform program that has been launched by President Obasanjo in his second term.
That fight against corruption must be seen as part and parcel of an overall reform program that we have been implementing now for 15 months. And the five pillars of this program are: the first plank is the fight against corruption and increasing transparency in the way that government business is done. The second plank is public service reforming, reforming our public service, slimming it down, training it, giving it incentives to work better, more efficiently, and that is also linked to making it a cleaner service. Public expenditure reform, reforming our budget process and introducing budget transparency and information to the citizens is another plank. And another plank tied to the public service reform I forgot to mention is privatization and deregulation of key sectors and encouragement of the private sector. And, of course, macroeconomic stability is a key underpinning of this reform program.
We believe that if we follow the structural reforms that we have put together to create the environment to unleash Nigeria's potential, and here we are talking not of the oil sector but of non-oil because, as you know, the oil sector doesn't create jobs and has, in fact, been a bane of our economic development. So we want to unleash jobs in the agriculture, solid mineral sector, the small and medium enterprises.
Now going back to the -- so I just wanted to give you a holistic picture that all of this hangs together.
On the specific issue of corruption, we've decided to be very specific in identifying those key areas where work needs to be done. The first is that there are questions about our oil accounts. You know, how much do they sell? What do they make? Where does the money go? And for that, we joined the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, which is designed, it's sort of an extension of publish what you pay kind of initiative where we're exposing what we get from our oil accounts, which revenues go to which section of government and what we are doing with those revenues.
Secondly, we are auditing, you know, for the past three years, 2000, 2001 -- sorry, 2001, 2001 to 2003, the accounts are going to have an audit of the accounts of our oil company and the accounts of the other operators within the economy. And we've already advertised internationally for auditors to do this and we will share it publicly.
We are also trying to punish those who do internet fraud, the 419 fraud that has cost us a lot of bad image. These letters that people received. We have an agency that has arrested about 500 people. They're in jail. Over 50 cases have been prosecuted, as we speak, and we are trying to speed up our court system and change it so we can get more prosecution.
We are also strengthening the police and the judiciary, all as part and parcel of this, and our own corruption agency. And we've taken steps. Two judges have been suspended. Some former ministers have been jailed for participation in corrupt activities that have been uncovered to show you that, you know, this -- the administration is not just talking but means business.
So these are some of the steps that we've taken, but very importantly, the transparency initiatives. We have published both on the Internet and in the newspapers, as I said, what each tier of government gets every month from oil revenues. This has generated an unprecedented conversation in the country about what has been done with the money. We have also just recently done budget monitoring document to show Nigerians and the world what are we doing in terms of implementing the present budget. We are publishing what was used in the past five years, what revenues the government received from oil, all tiers in the past five years, so that everybody can see.
And finally, we are launching a fiscal responsibility law. What we are saying is all these things we are doing must be made permanent, they must be locked in with legislation, and we have a fiscal responsibility bill that tries to lock in transparency, doing budget indicators, sharing the information, and so on. And this is ongoing now. We are doing public consultations, and if it works we should have this to the national assembly by the end of this year and passed by first quarter of next month. We also have a value for money audit system that has saved over a billion dollars, where we audit contractor trends, keep unit costs within these.
So I'm just saying all these things to show that on the corruption front we've made a lot of steps and we are very appreciative of the support in terms of technical assistance and moral support also from the G-8. We intent to continue these steps as vital elements of the reform program and we know that the results are already coming in. The IMF has written a very -- if you look at the Article 4 report, you see what they have to say in terms of the progress that Nigeria has made and is making, and they are monitoring us independently and giving objective assessment of how we are performing, and so for the indicators are good.
So I just want to thank Alan for giving us a chance to share this with you.
MR. DENIG: Thank you very much, Minister.
We'll now hear from the representative of the Government of Peru, Ms. Valdivieso.
MS. VALDIVIESO: Thank you. Thank you, Secretary Larson, Ambassador Wayne.
When the president of the Council of Ministers in Peru received an invitation for Peru to join this initiative, he was very pleased, he was very honored, and he thought it was a very good opportunity for Peru to make efforts in times of transparency in the combat corruption visceral.
That was the first reason. And the second, because we needed some kind of political support because this is a day-to-day effort. Peru has made many efforts in terms of fiscal transparency so far, in terms of fighting corruption, in political terms, as well. But it's not an easy fight. It's a day-to-day thing. Efforts have to be consolidated and progress have to be made.
Participating in this initiative, though it's a very new initiative, so far, first, has helped us so far in trying to identify gaps in terms of the promotion of transparency and how to combat corruption and that has been quite helpful. A second thing, the position has been taken to join the Initiative on Transparency for Extractive Industries. We don't know yet the terms we're going to have in appropriation, but there is a decision and we're getting admission from the World Bank and to DFID.
Then we have organized a plan which has been discussed in detail yesterday here and which has five basic issues and several activities identified. One is information and citizens because we think though there is websites and many transparency admissions and there is the access of information law, there is no culture of transparency. So, citizens have to know of the right. They have to participate more. They have to demand more.
A second issue is fiscal transparency. We have made enormous progress there, but there is a couple of gaps and we're going to continue.
Third one is procurement and we're going to start an electronic system on procurement and there is a couple of, also, projects that have been identified for support.
Fourth one is a very important process that is taking place in Peru, which is decentralization and we want a transparent decentralization process.
Most of the capacities and budget are going to be transferred to regional and local government and they have to have management skills. That's basic. So there is a very big training program on that.
And the fifth one is this decision to collaborate with an initiative on transparency for Extractive Industries. And that has to be developed yet, but that position has been taken.
So I think it has been a very constructive meeting yesterday. I think practical decisions have been taken. These have to be made operational, and hopefully in December there will be something a little bit more definitive.
Thank you very much.
MR. DENIG: Thank you, Ms. Valdivieso.
We'll now ask Assistant Secretary Wayne to make some remarks about the implementation of the compact.
ASSISTANT SECRETARY WAYNE: Thank you very much. Yesterday afternoon, as was indicated, we had very detailed working sessions to explore the specifics of each of the countries' action plans and to really get down to help identify these gaps. As is clear to all of you from what you've heard, these countries were each committed well ahead of time to fighting corruption and improving transparency, and they have many ongoing plans. So part of the effort of the G-8 countries is to find where they can have a value-added in supporting those plans and helping to fill the gaps. So in each of the working sessions yesterday, there were probing and questions and helping to identify that.
For example, in the session with Peru, which I had the pleasure of chairing, we looked through each of those project areas and we started talking about certain things, such as a training center to help train local government officials on how to do government procurement and how to put a local budget together and how to post it on the web. We talked about some gaps in building this national e-government procurement system and putting that in place. And we talked about some of the specific needs where there is yet work to do in helping educate Peruvians about their right to know and their right to ask to know. And so, now what's going to happen is in each of the capitals, the G-8 ambassadors and their embassies are going to work with the ministers and the officials and the working groups that are existing there to take this a step further in the weeks ahead to identify and to develop more detailed action plans and to come up with a concrete set of achievable actions and technical support that can be provided.
The goal is to have these done in November, and then to be able to move forward so there is actually some concrete action taking place by the end of the year. So that's the task ahead of us, but the meetings of the last two days have helped move us significantly along.
So I think now we'd all be available to answer some of your questions.
MR. DENIG: Thank you very much, Ambassador Wayne.
I'll be glad to take your questions now. You can direct them either in general or toward a specific representative. I would remind you to please use the microphone and identify yourself and your news organization.
We'll start with the lady up front here.
QUESTION: Thank you. This is Maria Isabel Rivero with the German Press Agency.
I would like to see if any of you would have any comments, especially the delegations from Latin America, on the corruption scandal that is affecting the Secretary General of the Organization of American States. It seems in this corruption fight, there is always a step forward and a step backwards. So I would really like to know what your countries are going to do regarding this problem.
MS. VALDIVIESO: Sorry. I think my government is evaluating what's going on. There is not enough information. Yet, we are against corruption, be it national or international corruption, but things have to be proven also. So I think there is not enough information as of yet.
MR. STADTHAGEN: I would also comment the same, you know, the issue is under evaluation and we will come out with our formal statement at one point, I would imagine.
MR. DENIG: All right. Let's go to the front row here, please.
QUESTION: Thank you. Ruben Barrera, with the NOTIMEX, Mexican News Agency.
I will put the issue in a different mode. And the question is -- and I would like to also know the take of Ambassador Larson in this.
Regardless of if Mr. Rodriguez is guilty or not of these charges, just the mere fact that the shadow of corruption is pending or is present in his office, how much of, you know, this situation had a negative impact in the fight of corruption in Latin America, taking into consideration that for the past years, at least in the Gaveria (ph) term of fighting against corruption once was one of the major issues. And the other was press hard to have more countries join into the Inter-America Convention Against Corruption.
Just putting aside, you know, the result of this inquiry, how bad is to have this, you know, issue bring into the OAS when the OAS is maybe the principal forum to fight corruption across the hemisphere?
UNDER SECRETARY LARSON: One of the things that I have learned in the work that I have done on anti-corruption over the years is that it's very important to be very open-eyed and candid about the fact that this problem exists around the world and it has very little to do with the morality of people. It has a lot to do with the types of systems within which people work.
We think that it is very much to the credit of this hemisphere that the countries have seen fit to enter into the Inter-American Convention Against Corruption, and we are hardened by the fact that so many countries around the hemisphere are taking concrete actions to implement this commitment to transparency. You've heard two stories just today from the representatives of Peru and Nicaragua, but you can look elsewhere around the hemisphere and see very important steps that are taking place.
In my experience as someone who also negotiated for my country the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention, I know that this is difficult work. Some of our speakers alluded to the need to change the political culture in their country. And I think that's been true not only of countries in the developing world, it's been true of some countries in the developed world, where there has been a culture that has permitted this, and if not in their own country, at least a culture that said it was all right when you went outside of your country.
And, you know, I think the ethic or the attitude that the countries represented here are trying to establish is that we need to be relentless in making the case that corruption and lack of transparency undermines democracies, it undermines development, and it corrodes public trust. And so, we have to fight it as a partnership. It won't mean that we change human nature overnight, but it does mean that you can make progress on this. And I think progress is being made in this hemisphere.
MR. DENIG: Any other comments?
MR. STADTHAGEN: Well, I would like to make a comment. In a recent poll, already five -- only five percent of the Nicaraguan public is saying that there is corruption in the executive branch, and now the eyes have focused on the judicial branch and other branches of government. So I think this differentiation, you know, in that democracy we have independence of branches. And I believe all of the evaluation mechanisms, as far as international, whatever, all the evaluation mechanisms normally focus on the country as a whole, but does not differentiate between branches of government.
And that is so. So I think we have -- we need to find flexibility in international fears to differentiate, you know, because, again, our executive can be committed against corruption but you have an independent branch, judiciary in the case of my country, or legislative, and corruption could be in those branches and there's very little we can do. We can go -- you know, we can see after our own patio, but what about the other branches? We can try to change laws, but that is a complicated problem. So perhaps we have to look into how we evaluate.
Thank you.
MR. DENIG: Okay, let's go to Russia in the first row here.
QUESTION: Thank you. My name is Andrei Sitov. I am with the Russian news agency ITAR-TASS. I would like to ask Ambassador Larson to comment a little bit on the technical and political support that you are providing for the initiative. What specifically do you want to do and will at any point in time you'll be willing to consider financial contribution to the efforts of these countries?
And also, is this an open-ended commitment from the part of the G-8? Is there a sort of a deadline by which you want to achieve results? And, presumably, you would also want this to be a model for other countries, not only to those present here, so how do you intend to achieve that?
Thank you.
UNDER SECRETARY LARSON: We recognize that the work that these countries and these individuals have undertaken is both important and difficult, and we think it is very important for the G-8 countries to stand with them as they work through the political difficulties of battling against entrenched interests and long habits.
We think that political support can be very valuable. We also think the policy support that we provide is very valuable, and by policy support I mean our implementation of commitments to be prepared to prosecute our business executives if they were ever to go into a country abroad and engage in unethical conduct, our willingness to cooperate with them in trying to identify and return assets that may have been stolen from countries abroad and brought into our countries.
The other way that we are very determined to cooperate with them is in financial and technical assistance. My government has set aside money in our budget to work with these partner countries and we have been talking to the Congress about our desire to continue to be able to respond to requests.
What might they look like? Well, a number of the speakers have talked about budget transparency being very important. The people need to know what money government has received and how it's been spent, and in many instances technical support can be helpful, financial support in setting up the systems that make that information available.
A second area that's very important is procurement. When there are big stakes, competitions over procurement, temptation can often arise, and it is important to have procurement systems that are open and transparent. And those are areas where technical assistance can be helpful in establishing the systems that allow those types of procurements to proceed on such an open and transparent basis.
So, yes, we have money available to support this. We do hope that other countries will choose to get involved in an exercise like this. We had more demand, more countries that would have been willing to enter into this, but we thought it was important to start right and to do a few of these compacts very well with a few countries that seemed very, very dedicated to making progress.
As we succeed, I think there would be a readiness to have more countries participate, particularly since the countries learn from each other. Already, yesterday one saw that these countries are fighting many of the same battles and so they have -- a part of the cooperation here is among them and learning from each other's experience.
MR. DENIG: All right, let's go to the far right there, please.
QUESTION: Nestor Ikeda, an Associated Press reporter for Latin America. I have, first of all, a follow-up question for Secretary Larson. Would you please tell us how did you pick out these four, these first four countries? What were the criteria you considered for inviting these countries?
And my question is because Japan is a member of the G-8 and Peru has a very long term of trying to get the former President Fujimora back to Peru, if you are considering this issue as part of your discussion.
UNDER SECRETARY LARSON: The short answer to your question is that we decided within the G-8 that we would be prepared to do compacts and we looked at countries that had made a strong commitment to making progress in this area of transparency and anti-corruption and we had some informal conversations among those. And what we tried to look for were the countries that not only had a broad political commitment but were also taking specific actions already, and who liked the idea of entering into a more specific partnership of the type that we've just described today that involved political support, technical support and a willingness to just work together.
And based on our consultations and the commitment that these countries had demonstrated, we in the G-8 decided that we should select roughly four because we felt that was probably the largest number with whom we could have real, genuine partnerships, and, after piloting this exercise with four countries, then we could expand beyond.
And on issue that you raised is one for the Peruvian and Japanese governments to address. It's not a G-8 issue.
MR. DENIG: All right, let's go to the gentleman right here.
QUESTION: Thank you. My name is Vladimir Kocerha. I write for Diario del Pais in Peru and other (inaudible) organizations in Peru. And my apologies to the Secretary Larson and Mr. Wayne. I mean, this is a loaded question. (Laughter.)
Mr. Ikeda just brought up the issue of previous corruption in Peru, corruption in the previous government, and the fact that, well, Peru is having still to fight with several other countries to get back former officials. Now, there are allegations that there is still corruption in Peru in the present government and from the packet you just gave us you say that in order to meet the goals that you are proposing, each of the countries, each of the G-8 countries, I understand, will have rules in place by the summer of 2005, where possible, to require due diligence for politically exposed persons' accounts. And each of the countries will have rules in place, preferably by the end of this year, to require wire transfer origination information.
Now, how will the public, or in this case the press, could have information about these individuals who are accused of corruption, of allegedly are -- have been transferring funds away from the country that might not be of a good source? From your government, one of the key turning points in the previous fight against corruption was when Cornelia Cova, the attorney general of Switzerland, provided information to the Peruvian Government of that time that Vladimir Montesinos had Swiss bank accounts, a country traditionally thought of being a safe haven for corrupt money.
Now, in the U.S. specifically, will you provide information to the public or to the press about banking accounts of certain individuals when we require it?
UNDER SECRETARY LARSON: Some of our colleagues may wish to comment in a broader context on the important issue that you raise, but let me try to answer directly your direct question.
This year, before the Sea Island summit, the justice ministers of the G-8 met, and they are the ones who formulated in greater detail this work program to address the questions that you raise: the establishment of requirements for due diligence for these accounts of politically exposed persons, setting up a mechanism on wire transfers. We also agreed on some specific investigative and information-sharing mechanisms as well: G-8 accelerated response teams, asset recovery case coordination and the holding of workshops by G-8.
In our conversations yesterday with these representatives, we heard quite clearly the importance that they place on this dimension of our cooperation and they have expressed an interest in working with us in the G-8 in a more intensive way on these issues, and we welcome that.
We have put in place since the meeting at Sea Island a process by which working groups -- it's all the Lyon-Roma Working Group -- but they're basically legal and justice experts working to give practical effect to the political commitments that you and I were just alluding to in the Sea Island documents. So that work is on track and it's proceeding.
But even as we proceed with setting up the mechanisms, we've had some very productive discussions with our representatives here about how to move even faster. And it may be that some of them would like to comment on this issue as well.
QUESTION: Sir, yeah, but the question was: Would the U.S. Government provide information on specific banking accounts when required by the public or the press?
UNDER SECRETARY LARSON: Well, I don't know what role the press has in this, but the whole point is to have in place the cooperative mechanisms between countries that allow sensitive investigative information to be exchanged. I mean, that's how these things work. What is being done in the first instance is that the G-8 is setting up mechanisms to make sure that we are able to work and engage on these issues.
What I was trying to say, perhaps didn't say it quite as clearly as I should have, is that in our discussions with these governments, they have expressed a real interest in working with us on the practical mechanisms for putting that cooperation in place. That doesn't mean that there's a mutual legal assistance treaty waiting here, drafted, ready to be signed, that sets in place all of these mechanisms. But it does suggest that at the leadership level of the G-8 is there readiness to work on these issues in a practical way to make sure that the type of cooperation, the type of cooperation you're calling for, exists. I'm not prepared to say whether it works in precisely the way that you outline because that framework hasn't quite been worked out yet.
MR. DENIG: Any other comments by anybody on that? Okay. All right. Any further questions? (No response.) Okay, then I want to thank our briefers very much and thank you, ladies and gentlemen, as well.
[End] Released on October 6, 2004
|