RE:Difficult days but another payment of $ 20 million for SnmOil minister says Iraq to act to annul Kurdish oil deals https://apnews.com/article/middle-east-iraq-baghdad-a9b6594e06b7b60fb4141e3e7f136b9b
BAGHDAD (AP) — Iraq’s oil minister said on Thursday the government will take steps to enforce a recent court decision to annul oil contracts the semiautonomous northern Iraqi Kurdish region made with international companies.
The minister, Ihsan Abdul-Jabbar Ismail, told The Associated Press the deals, which circumvent the government in Baghdad, are illegal and amount to oil smuggling.
His remarks were the strongest yet by a senior government official since Iraq’s Supreme Federal Court issued a landmark ruling in February against the northern region’s independent oil sector. Ismail said in total 17 oil companies will be targeted for their dealings with the Iraqi Kurdish region.
Ismail said the international companies that have signed these deals would first receive a cautionary note.
“We will give them a soft message: ‘You are working in the smuggling of oil.’ If they are a respectful company they will listen to us,” Ismail told the AP in the exclusive interview.
Ismail agreed the ruling came during a politically sensitive time but denied that it was a politicized decision. After the ruling, the Oil Ministry launched lawsuits against seven international companies, including Norway’s DNO, Canada’s Western Zagros and the U.K.-listed Gulf Keystone.
This week, Baghdad’s Commercial Court issued rulings invalidating four of the seven contracts, the oil minister said, with the other three to be decided on by the court at a July 17 session.
Ismail said the overall goal is to invalidate a total of 17 contracts. Some of the contracts are with companies from the United Arab Emirates, others are with Chinese and some with Russian companies, he said.
But Ismail said the ministry has a plan to also act on the commercial court ruling and would give foreign companies the option to cancel their contracts, request that Iraq’s federal government grant them a waiver — or transfer them from Kurdistan’s Ministry of Natural Resources to the federal government’s Oil Ministry in Baghdad, he said.
He dismissed claims that it would be technically impossible to transfer contracts from one authority to another, saying it’s a matter of “just paperwork.” The Kurdish region uses a production sharing contract model that is incompatible with the federal government’s preference for technical service contracts.
If the companies do not comply, Ismail said the government would resort to “the law and banks” to enforce decisions.
“We also have the Oil Police, but we haven’t asked to use them,” he said.
Oil companies contracted with the Kurdish region operate in territory de facto outside the federal government’s control. Sending federal police to physically shut down the operations in the Iraqi Kurdish region would amount to an unprecedented escalation