Advisor to the Prime Minister: Speeding up the approval of the oil and gas law will establish two important things, 28 SEPT

 Advisor to the Prime Minister: Speeding up the approval of the oil and gas law will establish two important things

The financial adviser to the Prime Minister, Mazhar Mohammed Saleh, stressed the importance of speeding up the approval of the draft oil and gas law.

Saleh said in a press statement that "accelerating the approval of the federal oil and gas project law in the House of Representatives as soon as possible will establish a stable national roadmap for investment and production of the country's main sovereign resource, which is oil and gas."

He explained that "this natural resource contributes to Iraq's GDP by a direct rate of nearly 50 percent, and leaves an indirect impact on the total economic activity of our country by at least 85 percent."

"The adoption of a unified national oil policy, and the achievement of investment and optimal production on Iraq's oil area, starting from the southern fields up to the fields of the north and the region, is an important and strategic matter in the matter of benefiting from the opportunity costs in the optimal and homogeneous operation of the Iraqi oil policy currently," Saleh said.

Not to mention "achieving the best financial returns for the country, which we all look forward to to finance the building of the Iraqi economy and the basics of sustainable development," according to Saleh.

Iraq's draft oil and gas law, which is available to parliament, stipulates that responsibility for managing the country's oil fields should be vested in a national oil company and supervised by a specialized federal council.

For its part, the Kurdistan Petroleum Law states that the Iraqi government "has the right to participate in the management of the fields discovered before 2005, but the fields discovered after it belong to the regional government."

The committee, which was formed between Baghdad and Kurdistan to draft an oil and gas law, includes "the minister of oil, the minister of natural resources in the region, the director general of SOMO and the advanced staff in the Ministry of Oil, as well as oil-producing provinces such as Basra, Dhi Qar, Maysan and Kirkuk."

Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani said in early August that "the draft oil and gas law is one of the basic and important laws, representing a factor of strength and unity for Iraq, and it has been stuck for years, at a time when the country today is in dire need of its legislation and benefit from this natural wealth, in all fields and sectors, as well as the contribution of the legislation of the law in solving many outstanding problems."

"There are provinces that have not invested their wealth until today, which is a negative matter for development efforts in all its tracks," he said.

The oil dispute has been a major source of tension between Baghdad and Erbil for years, reaching the judiciary last year, as Erbil believed that the central government was seeking to seize the region's wealth.

In February 2022, the Federal Court in Baghdad ordered the region to deliver oil produced on its territory to Baghdad, and canceled contracts signed by the region with foreign companies.
It went so far as to invalidate the judiciary in Baghdad for contracts with numerous foreign companies, particularly American and Canadian.

After years of exporting oil individually through Turkey, the Kurdistan region, as of late March 2023, had an international arbitration tribunal decision that gave Baghdad the right to fully manage Kurdistan's oil.

Exports from the Territory subsequently ceased.

\An interim agreement signed between Baghdad and Erbil in early April stipulates that Kurdistan oil sales will be made through the Iraqi Oil Marketing Company "SOMO", while revenues from the region's fields will be deposited in a bank account with the Central Bank of Iraq or one of the banks approved by the Central Bank of Iraq.