The first two pars of this article are pretty amusing:

Sleepy Dili, capital of East Timor, doesn't have much going for it. Its tallest building is just three storeys.

The most obvious economic activity is the purveying of SIM cards and pirate CDs of 'jiggy-jig'. The harbour is full of ships, but only because some dopey official misordered an import of rice. When a dozen boats arrived from Bangkok laden with the stuff, there weren't enough warehouses. So it stayed on the ships. Expensively. All year.

I haven't been in Dili for a while, so I'm assuming there are once again loads of ships off the coast, as there were before. There haven't been enough warehouses for some time. I think at one point they were shipping in concrete to build them so they had somewhere to put the rice.

But East Timor, one of the ten poorest places in the world, does have one thing going for it; a parliament so dysfunctional that it can't agree how best to invest the growing stash flowing in from oil and gas fields off its south coast. And because few East Timorese politicians can bear the sight of each other, let alone decide what to do with nature's bounty, the $5 billion in royalties East Timor has saved up since the Timor Sea fields came onstream in 2004 is automatically shunted into boring old US Treasuries throwing off a guaranteed 1.35 per cent.

The tone of the article is quite funny, but surely there is at least some agreement on how to spend the money. There is a budget every year, after all. Speaking of the budget, the finance ministry released its Q3 execution report recently. I haven't read it myself, but La'o Hamutak has, noting a number of budget line changes.

Many of these are interesting, but the largest is on page 42: a shift of $70 million within the Ministry of Infrastructure allocation for Capital and Development from the Heavy Oil power project to Pakote Referendum. The budget line for Construction of the "New Electric Generation system, transmission lines and supervision" has been cut from $87 million to $17 million, while the Capital line for the Office of the Secretary of State for Public Works has been increased from zero to $70 million, giving that office a total budget of $70,072,000.

And…

As we have written before, La'o Hamutuk believes that the objective of the State should be to provide services and benefits to its citizens, and that simply counting the percentage of money which has been spent is not a meaningful measure of how the Government is doing its job.

The Spectator article then goes on to praise the Timorese for the success of the Petroleum Fund in the face of the global economic crisis. The article also makes note of the transparency of the fund, which is actually not as transparent as people think, as La'o hamutuk also noted in its analysis of the Linaburg-Maduell index.

Timor-Leste score is "less than SWFI's suggested 'minimum rating of 8 in order to claim adequate transparency.'"