Some countries made industrial investments a precondition for resource deals.
"They need to do a much better job of creating jobs rather than simply signing natural resource deals that rarely serve the interests of the majority".
Nor is the practice confined to developing countries that feel they came off second-best when negotiating resource deals in years gone by.
Liberia has been keen to attract foreign investment, after a troubled past in which resource deals and blood diamonds helped to fuel a devastating 14-year-civil war.
An audit of lucrative resource deals in Liberia has found that almost all the concessions awarded by the government since 2009 have not been compliant with the law.
The country's leaders have grown more confident on the international stage and have begun to assert greater influence in Asia, Africa and Latin America, with things like special trade agreements and multibillion dollar resource deals.
For a time, she joined a coalition with the Fatherland Party, run by the former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko, who enriched herself so conspicuously in resource deals with Russia that she earned the nickname Gas Princess.
The total ante probably wouldn't exceed $10 million (with Schulze Global's share at $2 million)–tiny by comparison with some resource deals.
Without this 'sunshine' on natural resource deals, business will continue to be conducted in an opaque environment that enables payments to end up in the wrong hands.
It's not hard to imagine that Canada would be subject to many more cases like this under the TPP, given our recent history of promising lucrative resource deals to massive Asian multinationals like Petronas.
