Thread: Iraq/Dinar News. 09/05 to 01/14/07

Originally Posted by Gloribee

The date has come and gone along time ago. So I'd say no, theres no verifyable date for the 10k hand-out. It would be exciting if we knew, for most, me included believe its tied to the RV announcment.

Gloribee

the date for them to start giv en it out is already passed but didnt the article say they had till 1/31/07 to collect it ..I think it was something like that Ill see if I can find the article..Does anybody remember this as well?

Originally Posted by dinarmad

the date for them to start giv en it out is already passed but didnt the article say they had till 1/31/07 to collect it ..I think it was something like that Ill see if I can find the article..Does anybody remember this as well?

Yes its a old news from october 17 2006.Its not from today!!!!

Originally Posted by pipshurricane

Yes its a old news from october 17 2006.Its not from today!!!!

No offense PIPS but I think their trying to say that our reval has to happen before Jan 31st if that's why their holding up the 10k handout which it seems they are. Somebody see if this was the case beacause I too remember something about the time limit being 3 months.

Originally Posted by $onedaysoon$

FOUND THIS ON CBI WEB SITE, LOOKS LIKE ITS FROM TODAY
I AM GOING TO DIG AT IT AND SEE WHAT I CAN FIND


looks like its not new< just found date - august 2006

News

Statement Issued from the CBI

Concerning the Acceleration

Inflationary Phenomenon

(Arabic Version)

17/اب/2006

Ooops sorry i talk about this :)

Originally Posted by cigarman

No offense PIPS but I think their trying to say that our reval has to happen before Jan 31st if that's why their holding up the 10k handout which it seems they are. Somebody see if this was the case beacause I too remember something about the time limit being 3 months.

Thank you I wasnt tring to say it(R/V) has to happen by than but thats how long they said they had to collect the 10k from what that older article said..Sorry I should have been more clear in what I was saying..But we all would love for it happen than or before....GO DINAR

and heres to the Caymens

Originally Posted by AlwaysDreaming

From another forum, an email sent to Warka with reply...

Here is my email:

Thank you Mr. Ixxx. Do you know if foreigners will be investing in the ISX on January 8th?

I thought that the Financial Investment Law for Iraq was enacted a week ago.



Also do you know if the 10,000 dinars that was supposed to be given to the Iraqi people by the

government is still going to be given? Do you know when?



All the best,

xxxxxxxxxx


Here is his response:

Dear Mr. xxxxxx,



Until now the foreign investment law has not yet been enacted and implemented. Foreign investors are still not permitted to purchase stocks directly from the ISX in their names. I was personally present in the

last trading session and no procedures have been issued regarding this matter as the law has not yet been made available. We are just as eager to see the law put into official practice to serve our foreign clients best interests. I will keep you well posted and updated with any new developments regarding this matter.



This amount of 10000 dinars has not been given out yet and I doubt the Iraqi people would accept such an amount which represents a few dollars as one would accept a much greater amount as we hold the second largest oil reserve in the world and we are one of the richest countries in the region. &#194; We hope everyday the peace, stability and prosperity will flourish this country and that the Iraqi people get rewarded accordingly for all the hardship endured.

&#194; &#194;

Best and kind regards,

Mxxxxxx K. Ixxxx

Manager

International Foreign Relations Dept.

Wow, well guess that confirms it. Even Iraqis think this is a pitiful amount of money.... Not much more than a joke at the current rates. Shows that the Dinar has to be worth more or the gift will be an insult to the Iraqi people.

WOOHOO, Go Dinars.

Looking for Iraq's oil windfall
The country, which has one of the largest reserves in the world, could pump 6 million barrels a day or more. But that sure isn't happening now.
By Steve Hargreaves
NEW YORK, 15 December 2006 (CNN)
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Iraqi oil revenue was supposed to cover nearly all the costs of reconstruction.

The county's reserves are on the order of 115 billion barrels and, depending on who does the counting, tied with Iran for the world's second largest behind Saudi Arabia's 264 billion, according to the Energy Information Administration.

In early 2003, proponents of the war in the Bush administration said the entire effort might cost as little as $50 to $60 billion. Iraq was though to be capable of producing 3.5 million barrels of oil a day in short order, with that jumping to 6 million barrels a day or more in a few years' time. At current oil prices, that could have meant over $130 billion a year in oil money.

Now the U.S. will pour over $100 billion this year into the country, torn apart by a bloody three-year war, while oil production remains below pre-war levels. The latest EIA estimate said Iraq was pumping 1.9 million barrels per day.

Obviously, the continuing violence is largely to blame for keeping the country's spigots flowing at a relative trickle.

But uncertainty over who controls what fields is also keeping investors, badly needed to repair the country's aging infrastructure, away.

And massive corruption means a sizeable amount of oil - some estimates have been as high as 500,000 barrels a day - goes straight to the black market.

"The fields are still there," said Manouchehr Takin, an energy analyst at the Center for Global Energy Studies in London, who also added that vast parts of the country are still unexplored. "It's the politics that have degraded."

Ongoing violence
First and foremost, pipelines and refineries have to stop exploding.

The best way to do that, experts say, is to give disaffected Sunnis, responsible for many of the infrastructure attacks, a stake in the oil wealth.

At issue is who has the right to sign oil contracts with foreign companies and how the royalties should be divided.

Currently, royalties on existing oil fields go to the central government while royalties on future oil fields go to the regions. But the issues of contract rights and royalty payments are being debated in the Iraqi parliament.

Supporters of more regional control include the Kurds and some Shiites. Oil-rich northern Iraq is largely Kurdish while oil-rich southern Iraq is largely Shiite.

The Sunnis, who tend to have greater presence in oil-free central areas, want royalties to go to the central government and then be doled out based on population.

"Think of how people behave if someone in the family dies without leaving a will, and you'll see how important it is to get this right," said Amy Myers Jaffe, a fellow in energy studies at the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy who worked on the recent Iraq Study Group Report.

The report, also known as the Baker-Hamilton report after its co-chairs James Baker and Lee Hamilton, said all oil revenue should go to the central government.

"No formula that gives control over revenues from future fields to the regions or gives control of oil fields to the regions is compatible with national reconciliation," the report said.

Oil companies, which must make multi-billion dollar investments with decades-long time horizons, would also prefer to sign a contract with the central Iraq government rather that with the leader of some semi-autonomous region, said Steven Simon, a Fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.

"The (current) environment for investors is utterly uninviting," said Simon.

But Simon gave the current Iraqi parliament only a 20 percent chance of passing something that quelled the violence, provided a stable legal framework and was acceptable to the Shiites and Kurds.

"A one-in-five chance in the current Iraqi environment is pretty optimistic," he said.

An Iraqi government committee working on the issue deadlocked Wednesday.

As for the Iraqis ramping up production on their own, Simon said it wasn't likely.

"If you're an (Iraqi) oil guy and you've got technical skills, you try to get out of there and get a job someplace else," he said.

Deadly corruption
Corruption is the other problem the country must get resolve before Iraq can get serious about rebuilding its oil industry.

Jaffe said that when the Baker-Hamilton report was being prepared, one Iraqi official told her so much fuel disappears from a big refinery near Baghdad that the country would be better off to just close it down.

Jaffe said those skimmed petrol products are then shipped all over the region by a clandestine trucking network that's been in place since the oil-for-food program limited oil sales under Saddam Hussein. Or the products go to fill shortages in Iraq caused by fuel subsidies that don't allow the market to meet demand.

Profits from these black market fuel sales are a main funding source for insurgent and other violent groups inside the country.

The New York Times recently reported that Iraq's insurgents are now economically self-sufficient and even have the means to sponsor terrorist groups outside the country.

To combat corruption, the Baker-Hamilton report recommended installing meters to measure how much oil flows through a pipeline and then paying security guards based on output, not a flat rate.

The report also recommended reducing the fuel subsidies to better allow the market to meet domestic demand, as well as provide training in areas such as procurement and accounting, to make the industry more transparent.

Looking for Iraq's oil windfall | Iraq Updates

raq oil law talks stall on right to clinch deals
By Mariam Karouny
BAGHDAD, 15 December 2006 (Reuters)
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An Iraqi government committee drafting an oil law has failed to agree whether regions or the centre should sign deals on foreign investment and it is up to political leaders to find a solution, sources said on Wednesday.

Sources among Iraq's Shi'ite majority and close to the talks said the chief sticking point was the insistence of the ethnic Kurds, whose region embraces the country's northern oilfields, that it should have the right to control undeveloped deposits.

"There is one outstanding issue and it needs a political agreement," Deputy Prime Minister Barham Salih, an ethnic Kurd who heads the Oil Committee, said.

"We are trying to reach a compromise formula," he told Reuters.

The contracts issue is vital to Iraq's future as a solution favouring the regions would devolve power over its most valuable resources to the majority Shi'ites and the Kurds, who inhabit regions with oilfields, weakening the central government.

"The law now awaits more talks between the Iraqi government and the Kurdish region," Oil Ministry spokesman Asim Jihad told Reuters.

The industry desperately needs foreign investment to revive the shattered economy, which relies heavily on oil export revenues. Iraq sits on the world's third largest crude reserves.

Minority Sunni Arabs, who were the dominant group under Saddam Hussein before the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, fear regional devolution will leave them with nothing.

Even though the Shi'ites are dominant in the southern region also containing major oilfields, they have so far also opposed the Kurdish stance in the talks.

"The first round of the talks has failed, now we are waiting for the second round," a senior oil industry source told Reuters.

The Oil Committee which includes the oil minister, has agreed on more than 90 percent of the law.

Salih, who said talks will resume in a few days, was hopeful the Iraqi officials would overcome their differences.

He said the committee has agreed on oil revenue sharing and on restructuring of the industry, which he called key issues.

"We have not failed. The talks will resume in few days, the oil law is the priority for the government," he said.

Iraqi officials have always said that the law will be delivered to the parliament to ratify by the end of December. Salih said that officials were working hard to meet the deadline.


Iraq oil law talks stall on right to clinch deals | Iraq Updates

Originally Posted by kiko

Oil and Iraq - Dec 13
PSAs and Iraqi oil

...The truth, however, is that plans have been underway for some time, beginning even before the invasion, to ensure U.S. and British domination of Iraqi oil. When neoconservatives in the early days of the occupation proposed the privatization of oil resources what they were referring to was legal ownership of the oil reserves in the ground, prior to extraction of the oil. It was this form of privatization that Washington adamantly rejected.

But private ownership of oil in this sense exists in no country of the world except the United States and was never a genuine option. The real issues of privatization are not who owns the oil in the ground, but who gets the revenue from the oil once it is extracted and who controls its development and exploitation.

Classical oil imperialism in the early decades of the twentieth century took the form of long-term concessions that the colonial countries and their giant oil companies imposed on the oil-producing countries in the periphery. The corporations of the colonial powers took charge of the development and exploitation of oil fields and got the revenue from the sale of the oil, paying royalties and taxes to the governments of the subject states.

...With the old imperial concessions model increasingly no longer feasible, Western oil companies and their governments concocted a new model called the “production sharing agreement” (PSA). PSAs provide political camouflage while embodying the material equivalent of the old concessions regime.

The oil states appear to retain control, but both the revenue stream and decisions on the development of oil fields are under the control of the giant oil corporations, which are in a position to reap enormous profits from the extraction and sale of the oil in accord with these agreements.

The future actions of oil states are severely constrained under such agreements, since provisions in the PSAs make them immune to the passage of any subsequent legislation that might alter the basic rules. PSAs grant to corporations exclusive rights to exploit oil reserves for decades. Moreover, they allow them to “book” these reserves as assets, increasing the total asset value of their companies.

Although PSAs are not uncommon for small oil producing countries with high extraction costs, often involving offshore fields, they are non-existent among major Middle East producers, and only cover about 12 percent of oil reserves worldwide.

Of the seven biggest oil exporting countries (including Iraq) only Russia, as a result of the Western-dominated shock therapy regime after the collapse of the Soviet Union, has PSAs, but these are extremely controversial, costing the state billions of dollars, and additional ones are unlikely to be signed (Greg Muttitt, Crude Designs: The Rip-Off of Iraq’s Oil Wealth [PLATFORM, 2005] www.carbonweb.org).

The Iraqi government is required to complete its final oil law by the end of this month in accord with an agreement concluded with the IMF a year ago.

The new draft oil law was written mainly by Washington and London and by the representatives of the giant oil corporations.

As leading British oil industry analyst and critic Greg Muttitt observed in Foreign Policy in Focus (Foreign Policy in Focus - A Think Tank Without Walls, August 28, 2006):

“Last month, the administration and major oil companies reviewed and commented on a new law governing Iraq’s crucial oil sector, before it has even been seen by the Iraqi parliament” (emphasis added).

Although written behind closed doors, it is clear that the new draft legislation strongly promotes PSAs.

While the actual details of the draft legislation are not yet public, in an earlier stage of negotiations over the Iraqi oil industry it appeared that foreign companies would be given control of all currently undeveloped Iraqi oil fields, potentially allocating to global oil corporations control over 80 percent or more of Iraq’s known oil reserves.

For the first time in more than three decades, since Iraqi oil was nationalized in 1975 under Saddam Hussein, foreign firms would gain control of Iraq’s oil, booking it under their own assets.

Given the present occupation, U.S. and British firms would obviously be well positioned to obtain the lion’s share of such contracts.
(Dec 2006)

Oil and Iraq - Dec 13 | EnergyBulletin.net | Peak Oil News Clearinghouse


Confirmation that it has to be done by 1/1/2007!

I think Blair will also this discuss it during his visit.

So, they have 9 more working days to get the HCL done before they go on break for the Muslin holiday of Eid al Adha (Feast of Sacrifice) which starts on the 31 of December 2006 thru January 3, 2007, just want to know if this information is correct.

Could there be some kind of retributions taken against the GOI for not being in compliance with the IMF? I wonder

Iraq's National Reconciliation Conference opens in Baghdad
17 December 2006 (BBC Monitoring)
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The National Reconciliation Conference of the Iraqi Political Forces and Parties has opened in Baghdad, Al-Iraqiyah TV reported on 16 December.

Among those attending are Nuri al-Maliki, Iraq's prime minister, Mas'ud Barzani, president of the Kurdistan Region; and Abd-al-Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq.

Iraqi President Jalal Talabani was unable to attend due to a "health indisposition", his spokesman told the conference.

Source: Al-Iraqiyah TV, Baghdad


Iraq's National Reconciliation Conference opens in Baghdad | Iraq Updates