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Iraq government to get revenue from Kurdish oil
Iraq's central government will get revenue from the deals struck by the country's semiautonomous Kurdish region even as it continues to reject those accords, the oil minister said Friday.
Iraqi Oil Minster Hussain al-Shahristani spoke to The Associated Press at the three-day World Economic Forum in Jordan, where business and political leaders were drafting the Mideast's response to the global recession.
The Iraqi government has no relations whatsoever with the contracts which have already been signed between Iraqi Kurdistan and the companies working in those areas," al-Shahristani said.
However, the minister added that the Kurds have acceded to a central government request that the proceeds from these deals "go to the central treasury and be distributed to all the regions of Iraq."
The agreement could help resolve the long-standing dispute between the central government in Baghdad and the Iraqi Kurds, concentrated in the oil-rich north. The two sides have been at loggerheads over deals signed by the semiautonomous Kurdish authority and foreign companies, with the Baghdad government maintaining those deals were illegal since a national oil law had yet to be passed.
Still, Shahristani added that any party involved in oil deals with the Kurds needed to present them officially to the Iraqi government to have them endorsed "if we find them to be in Iraq's interest."
On May 8, Kurdish Natural Resources Minister Ashti Hawrami said the region's first crude oil initial exports would start on June 1, with about 60,000 barrels a day from Tawke field and another 40,000 barrels per day to follow from the Taq Taq field later that month.
The Kurds hope to export 250,000 bpd from both fields by the end of 2009.
Tawke is being developed by independent Norwegian oil company DNO, while Turkey's Genel Enerji and Canada's Addax Petroleum Corp. are jointly operating Taq Taq.
Iraq, which holds the world's third-largest known oil reserves of at least 115 billion barrels, is suffering a financial squeeze as crude prices fall on the back of a global recession-fueled erosion in demand.
The government is looking to increase revenues by signing new oil deals with international companies, but they have been hampered by the ongoing failure of parliament to pass an oil investment law.
source: http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2009/05/15/ap6428083.html
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