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Iraq’s oil minister said Thursday the government would take action in the face of a recent court ruling to cancel oil contracts with foreign corporations in iraq’s semi-autonomous Kurdish region.
Minister Ihsan Abdul-Jabbar Ismail told The Associated Press that the deals, which circumvent the Baghdad government, are illegal and related to oil smuggling.
His comments were the most powerful ever made by a senior government official since Iraq’s Federal Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling in February opposing the independent oil sector in the northern region. Ismail said a total of 17 oil corporations will be attacked by his Iraqi Kurdish region.
Ismail said corporations that have signed those agreements will first get a warning.
“We will give you a comfortable message: ‘you paint on oil smuggling. ‘If they are a respectful company, they will pay attention to us,” Ismail told the AP in the exclusive interview.
Kurdish officials, the ruling Kurdistan Democratic Party in Erbil, have rejected the court’s ruling as politicized and claim the Supreme Court itself is unconstitutional.
The resolution came amid political unrest in Baghdad, where Iranian-backed teams are pressuring Kurdish parties to join forces and continue to form a government after influential Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, who won last year’s parliamentary election, resigned. of the political procedure because it may not bring enough lawmakers into the 329-seat chamber. The Kurdistan Democratic Party was allied with al-Sadr.
The Iraqi Kurdish region has also faced an increasing number of attacks targeting its energy infrastructure. Last month, rocket and mortar fire hit a fuel box, while others attacked a pumping station and refineries.
For years, the Iraqi Kurdish government exploited a constitutional loophole and controlled the export of crude oil and a modicum of monetary independence from the federal government in Baghdad. They kept the main points of their inconsistent deals a secret, adding their production rates. Iraq’s Oil Report, an oil industry publication, estimates it at 440,000 consistent barrels a day.
Now Baghdad officials will close that door, Ismail said.
The February court ruling rightly rejected Iraq’s Kurdish oil law as the legal basis the region had used to continue its exports and independent contracts. Many of the times of this resolution, given that it had been overdue for years. At the time, the Kurdistan Democratic Party and al-Sadr had attempted to form a government without the Iranian-backed parties.
Ismail said the resolution came at a politically sensitive time, but denied it was a politicized resolution. Following the ruling, the Oil Ministry filed lawsuits against seven foreign companies, including Norway’s DNO, Canada’s Western Zagros and Britain’s Gulf Keystone.
This week, Baghdad’s publicity court issued rulings that invalidated 4 of the seven contracts, the oil minister said, and the other 3 will be approved at the July 17 session.
Ismail said the overall purpose is to invalidate a total of 17 contracts. Some of the contracts are with corporations in the United Arab Emirates, others with Chinese corporations and others with Russian corporations, he said.
Iraqi Interim Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi has stayed so far removed from recent events, issuing conciliatory statements about the strained relations between Baghdad and the Kurdish authorities.
But Ismail said the ministry also intends to act on the publicity court’s ruling and would give foreign corporations the ability to cancel their contracts, ask the Iraqi federal government to grant them an exemption, or move them from Kurdistan’s Ministry of Natural Resources to the federal government. The government’s oil ministry in Baghdad said.
He rejected claims that it would technically be passing contracts from one authority to another, saying it was just a matter of “fair bureaucracy. “The Kurdish region uses a production-sharing contract style that is incompatible with the federal government’s preference for facility contracts.
If corporations don’t comply, Ismail said the government would use “the law and banks” to make decisions.
“We also have the oil police, but we have not asked to use it,” he said.
Major oil corporations, in addition to Baker Hughes, Haliburton and Schlumberger, pledged to obey the ministry’s blacklist policy and said they would not seek new tenders from Iraqi Kurdish authorities. For years, foreign corporations have operated in the Kurdish region with the safety of Kurdish officials. that they would not run legal risks.
Oil corporations under contract with the Kurdish region operate de facto in territory outside the federal government. Sending federal police to physically prevent operations in the Iraqi Kurdish region would amount to an unprecedented escalation.
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