Kurds Get Piece of Oil Wealth; Foreign Investment Questions Linger
While pressure on the Baghdad government mounted, Iraqi oil unions staged protests in early June. Many Iraqis believe the measure would drive the oil industry toward privatization and unfairly benefit outside oil companies.
“We think the proposed oil law doesn’t serve the interests of the Iraqi people at all,” said Faleh Abood Umara, general secretary of the Southern Oil Company Union and the Iraqi Federation of Oil Workers’ Unions, at a news conference in New York on June 18. “It emphasizes or confirms American hegemony over Iraqi oil fields.”
The unions have said they worry negotiations could result in a law that would give foreign companies too much influence. But details of how foreign investors would be involved are still being nailed down, said David Pumphrey, deputy director of the energy program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. …
… Foreign oil companies, meanwhile, are waiting for the oil law to provide a structure in which to operate in the country. The law was intended to build confidence in the stability of the system and provide incentives to work in a still violent region.
“This is an industry that makes very long decisions. They reap their profits over a period of decades, and it takes years to develop projects,” Greg Priddy, an energy analyst at the Eurasia Group, told the NewsHour in May.
“They need to be confident that it’s going to be stable, not just the next few years, but out 30 years or so, way beyond the U.S. occupation.”
We knew this was about oil, this just documents it.