On 12 May 2003 Marchenko held a speech entitled "Caspian Oil Windfall: Who Will Benefit?" at a conference in Washington D.C. that the Open Society Institute and the Center for Strategic and International Studies sponsored. In his speech, he defended the National Fund of Kazakhstan's management of revenues from Kazakhstan's petroleum production and he criticised a book published by the OSI with the same title as his speech referring, in particular, to 40 factual "mistakes" found by him in said book.