The alternative to a fund would have been to directly regulate production by putting a conservative upper limit on annual extraction. This was attempted in the 1970s and -80s. At that time, we had a production ceiling of 90 million standard cubic metres per year. This approach was abandoned in the 1980s. Today, the government steers exploration activities  BIS Review 81/2008  1  and awards production licenses, but has no explicit production target. Since the mid-1990s, total petroleum production has been around 250 million standard cubic metres per year. The Fund mechanism The Fund is by law fully integrated with the government budget, and the same priorities are imposed on spending from the Fund as on any other government spending. This means that the entire petroleum revenues are transferred to the Fund. An amount equal to the non-oil budget deficit is then transferred to the fiscal budget. The mechanism ensures that the accumulation of capital in the Fund is equal to government net financial savings. There is no corresponding increase in liabilities. Furthermore, legislation prohibits use of Fund money for purposes not prioritised in the regular budget processes. There is no hidden use of oil money, or any use for special purposes. The Fund is strictly and effectively “out of bounds” to special interests.
Arthur Yuen: Welcome remarks - HKMA Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Financing of Terrorism Regulatory Technology Forum Welcome remarks by Mr Arthur Yuen, Deputy Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, at the HKMA Anti-Money Laundering and Counter-Financing of Terrorism (AML/CFT) Regulatory Technology (RegTech) Forum (Excerpt), Hong Kong, 22 November 2019. * * * 1. First of all let me welcome you all to this AML/CFT Regtech Forum, which we intend to be the first in a series. 2. In particular let me thank everyone for the very positive response and participation of key stakeholders including the FinTech Association of Hong Kong, experts, academia, other regulators as well as our partners in government bureaux, Companies Registry, Joint Financial Intelligence Unit (JFIU), Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) and Hong Kong Association of Banks. 3. Let me start with a question that speaks to why we are all here today: how effective are we, really, in our important role in anti-money laundering and counter-terrorist financing? We all recognise the efforts of the banking sector over many years – and continuing today – in helping to combat money laundering and terrorist financing. This has recently been praised by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), which gave us a very good score card in its Mutual Evaluation Report on Hong Kong. 4. But, despite the mutual evaluation result, no system is perfect and most of the challenges we face – money laundering from fraud, tax crimes and corruption to name but a few – are global in nature.