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

Originally Posted by noced71

All,

I thought there was something wrong with my home computer or I had a virus or something!!!!

I am here at work logged into rolclub, but cannot get on the site from home. I keep getting blocked!!! I thought it was very strange. I can log into my home computer and post a screenshot from here at work. I get the same "securing connection" when I try to log on.

Here's a screenshot, hope you can see it.

Thanks Noced71. That is what I have been getting on some of my pages this morning when I try to access rolclub. Wasn't sure what that was.

I can't log in at all from home.

I got that email you were talking about from GFF.

Does that have anything to do with it?

Did I download something from them that wont enable me to see the rol club page anymore? Do I need to reinstall IE6 or what's the fix to this?

If anyone knows plz email...thanks

Not sure The Mad Scot. I think I read on a previous post about GFF and they said not to open anything from them. Some one said to go in and delete anything with GFF on it and remove your cookies so I did that. They evidently have the data base from Rol Club on there 20,000 members because they use our name as we have it on rol club. Hope this helps.

Senators bemoan lack of Iraq oil law progress

By Chris Baltimore
Reuters
Thursday, January 11, 2007; 4:49 PM

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. senators on Thursday grilled U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice over a yet-unpublished Iraqi oil law that is expected to set terms for investment and revenue-sharing in the war-torn nation's battered hydrocarbon sector.

Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on U.S. President George W. Bush's plan to send more troops to Iraq, Rice tried to assure impatient U.S. lawmakers that Iraqi officials are making progress on the hydrocarbon law.

Condoleezza Rice received a bipartisan scolding from the Foreign Relations Committee. (Melina Mara -- The Washington Post)

"You referred to the oil law as a remarkable law," Sen. John Sununu, New Hampshire Republican, told Rice. "Well, it's the most remarkable law that no one has ever really seen."

The Bush administration had hoped that Iraq's vast oil reserves of 115 billion barrels, the third-largest on the globe, would fund rebuilding efforts.

But the OPEC member's oil sector has been crippled by sabotage attacks, corruption, and years of neglect under sanctions before the U.S.-led invasion of March 2003.

Iraq's government is hammering out an oil law to regulate foreign investment. But it has been held up by disagreements over how revenues will be divided between provinces and the central government, and over who will have authority to sign contracts with foreign companies.

Sununu said he had been briefed on the oil law recently by members of the White House National Security Council, and had received a top-secret briefing from individuals he did not identify.

"What we can gain is that there has been some agreement on investment issues, and even ownership, but not on distribution," Sununu said. "And from where I sit, it's distribution that really matters."

"Distribution has actually been less of a problem than the question of who gets to sign contracts," Rice said. "That's frankly been the one that they've been hung up on."

Sununu bemoaned a lack of clear information from the White House on oil law progress.

"Senior National Security Council staff was able to tell me and others in the room nothing about distribution methodology," he said.

Fellow Republican Sen. Norm Coleman of Minnesota asked Rice why the administration has not set a deadline for publishing the oil law.

"Why wouldn't it be wiser to hold the Iraqis to certain benchmarks, to tell them, 'You have X number of months to pass an oil law?"' Coleman asked Rice.

The contract issue is vital to Iraq's future as a solution favoring the regions would devolve power over its most valuable resource to the majority Shi'ites and the Kurds whose regions are home to the country's most coveted oil fields.

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

Ethnic Kurds whose region includes the country's northern oil fields including the giant Kirkuk field have signed some contracts with foreign oil companies, spurring confusion over who has the authority to ink contracts.

Rice said the oil law would not give the Kurds such authority.

"Even though the Kurds might have been expected ... to insist that they will simply control all the resources themselves, that's not what the oil law does," Rice said.

Well gert...doesn't sound like the white house is letting out any secrets..

Number of banks 14 -----
Auction price selling dinar / US $ 1315 -----
Auction price buying dinar / US $ 1313 -----
Amount sold at auction price (US $) 103.410.000 -----
Amount purchased at Auction price (US $) 75.000
Total offers for buying (US $) 103.410.000 -----
Total offers for selling (US $) 75.000

Planning Minister Ali Ghalib Baban declared that the suggested yearly specifications total amounts for 2007 reached 12, 565 trillion dinars which presents ($10 Billion).

In a press statement Baban said that the mentioned amounts delivered as 3 trillion diner for oil ministry projects to rehabilitation oil sector, while electric ministry specifics amounted 1 trillion and 745 billion dollars for proving electric energy in the state.
He added that they specified 430 billion diner for health ministry and 425 billion diner for municipality ministry besides 422 billion diner for housing ministry and other 336 billion diner for education sector.On the other hand, he mentioned that there were many situations forced such conditions which couldn't pass over like the high expenses for security and defense sector estimated 10 trillion diner besides the high salaries after the falling of the ex-regime

Source: Al Saba

Great to be back home.

Lukoil set to revive $4bn Saddam oil deal
By Tim Webb
Published: 14 January 2007
Lukoil, the Russian oil company, is poised to resurrect the $4bn (£2bn) contract it signed with Saddam Hussein's regime to develop one of Iraq's largest oil fields.

The company's US rival Conoco-Phillips will also benefit as it has a stake in the joint venture with Lukoil to develop the West Qurna-2 field, which holds up to 16 billion barrels of oil.

Iraq's long-awaited hydrocarbon law, which will soon be put before the Iraqi parliament, contains a provision that states that existing contracts to develop the country's 115 billion barrels of reserves remain valid, subject to revision. Article 31 of the draft obtained by The Independent on Sunday says: "Any contract made under existing law concerning Exploration and Production of Petroleum in the territory of Iraq shall remain valid."

Lukoil's president, Vagit Alekperov, plans to visit Iraq in the next few weeks as the company continues negotiations with the Iraqi oil ministry. The Russian firm may have to bring in other partners because of the size of the field, which experts say will cost $4bn to develop.

A Lukoil spokesman said that once it is given the official go-ahead, development can begin in three months. "But everything depends on the security situation," he added.

Please excuse if previously posted before everything went down. Thank you.

A New Oil Plan for Iraq


In his speech announcing plans to boost troop levels in Iraq, George Bush noted that Iraq was about to pass "legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis" in order to give the citizens of that country a share in the economy. Indeed, the 33-page draft of that proposed Oil & Gas Law now circulating, if passed as currently written, would end decades of total government control over Iraq's mammoth oil reserves and distribute oil income among all the country's regions — a dramatic change from the past and a potential windfall for Big Oil. But it must first get through Iraq's fractious parliament and the country's divisive ethnic politics. Already, the draft shows signs of wrangling and potentially troublesome compromise.

With the stakes high, negotiations have been fraught, particularly with the Kurds in the country's oil-rich north. A small government committee met in Baghdad over several weeks late last year to thrash out whether the Kurds' regional government could cut its own oil deals with foreign companies without Baghdad interfering. Kurdish officials have argued their case for months. The proposed law offers a tortuous compromise. A new Federal Council of Oil & Gas will have 60 days to object to any oil deal the Kurds make, and only then with the agreement of two-thirds of the council's members — which will include a Kurdish official. Disputes would also be taken to a new group of independent advisers, who "might include foreign oil and gas experts, Iraqi or foreign," says the document.
Equally thorny is the status of the giant oil fields around Kirkuk, whose capacity is about 700,000 barrels a day, and which the Kurds claim as their own. Under the new law those revenues — like those from elsewhere — will flow into a new national Oil Fund and then be carved up among each region in proportion to its population. Since only the Kurds in the north and the Shi'ites in the south produce oil, that ensures Sunni areas around central Iraq — coyly termed "non-producing provinces" in the law — aren't left out of the deal, potentially deepening Iraq's ethnic divide.

As written, the law would end more than three decades of Iraq's nationalized oil industry. It would give 10-year exploration and development rights to foreign oil companies — at least those willing to start drilling in a country where hundreds of contractors have been killed and pipelines are regularly blow up. Once the exploration deals expire, the companies can negotiate to produce the oil for another 20 years in partnership with the state-owned Iraq National Oil Company. Foreign oil companies would then pay the government 12.5% royalties of the oil's value, and be able to export the rest of whatever oil they find — potentially massive amounts.

Indeed, early word of the document last weekend brought howls from some groups that believe Iraq's government is offering big oil companies overly generous production-sharing deals, which it could regret when the war finally ends. The alternative would be heavy state control, along the lines of the two oil giants that border Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Iran. "What we are looking at is Iraq signing deals for next 20 years at a time when it is extremely weak and not fully sovereign," says Greg Muttitt, co-director of Platform, a watchdog organization in London that monitors the oil and gas industries. "The U.S. has put a lot of effort into this." But it's not certain that U.S. or British majors like ExxonMobil or BP will be the first big benefactors. Both China and India signed exploration deals with Saddam before the war, which remain in effect.

Whichever companies arrive, their finds could be massive. The country sits atop about 115 billion barrels of oil reserves — the fourth largest in the world after Saudi Arabia, Canada and Iran — and about 110 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. What is more, much of the oil is relatively easy to reach and cheap to pipe out. There is a catch, however: the infrastructure is in dire shape. Even before this war, rigs and wells had lain rotting for years, since the crippling war with Iran in the 1980s sapped the economy and international sanctions in the 1990s left Iraq in bad need of spare parts. "The consequences have been really quite severe. Things are in bad shape," says James Placke, senior associate of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, who spent decades in the region as a U.S. diplomat. "It is not a good investment environment." That is an understatement. Iraq's oil minister Hussein al-Shahrastani has said in recent months that it will take about $20 billion to fix Iraq's equipment well enough to more than double its current output of about 2 million barrels a day, to about 4.5 million barrels in five years' time. In Iraq, that is a very long time off.
Source: Time