Parliamentary Committee: The oil and gas law is lingering in the corridors of the government… and the reason?
Parliamentary Committee: The oil and gas law is lingering in the corridors of the government… and the reason?
03/21/2024
A member of the Parliamentary Oil, Gas and Resources Committee revealed the reasons for the continued disruption of the oil and gas law legislation, which has been postponed for several parliamentary sessions.
Ali Abdel Sattar Al-Mashkur told {Al-Furat News} agency, “First of all, everyone should know that the draft oil and gas law is still with the government and has not reached the House of Representatives or our committee for us to study it or initiate its legislation.”
He added, “There is a real intention on the part of the committee to legislate this law, but on its condition and conditions, and that it gives everyone their due rights and does not discriminate between one party and another regarding entitlements and duties.”
Al-Mashkoor said, “In the end, there are still controversial points at the core of the spirit of the law, and this is what made it wander politically within the corridors of the government.”
It is noteworthy that since the first session of the Iraqi Council of Representatives, in 2005, the draft oil and gas law has been stuck in the drawers, as disagreements prevented its approval in its final form, and it was even described as the “big knot” law in Iraq due to the extent of the disagreements over it.
After 18 years, he announced, in late August 2023, the formation of a committee to develop a draft of the oil and gas law and present it to the government and the House of Representatives.
Iraq exports an average of 3.3 million barrels of crude oil per day, and black gold constitutes more than 90 percent of the Iraqi treasury’s resources.
The draft oil and gas law in Iraq available to Parliament stipulates that responsibility for managing the country’s oil fields must be entrusted to a national oil company, and supervised by a federal council specialized in this subject.
For its part, the Kurdistan Oil Law indicates that the Iraqi government “has the right to participate in the management of fields discovered before 2005, but the fields discovered afterward belong to the regional government.”
alforatnews.iq
