Central gov’t Government – Shell agreement without Basra admin’s knowledge – MP

BAGHDAD / IraqiNews.com: Former Iraqi legislature, Wail Abdul-Latif, has said on Sunday that the agreement signed between Baghdad’s Central Government and Shell Gas Company for the investment of the Basra Gas, alongside its oil, faced problems as Basra Province’s local administration did not possess any details on the agreement. “The Current Constitution is the only constitution in the history of Iraq which openly describes oil as a national fortune, laying the basis for it being equal property of all Iraqis, and not the oil-producing provinces only, but for all provinces, based on their inhabitants’ percentages,” Abdul-Latif, commented in a working paper he presented to an action workshop about the challenges confronting the oil-extraction industry, organized by the Economic Reform Institute in Baghdad and attended by IraqiNews.com. “The Constitution grants certain privileges for the provinces that are lacking high incomes when compared to other provinces, in order to assure they receive a higher share from the oil revenues,” Abdul-Latif said. “The time has come to uncover the details of writing the first draft for the Oil & Gas law, after much talk of it during the past few years,” Chairman of the Consultants Committee of the Iraqi Council of Ministers, Thamir al-Ghadban, pointed out. “A lot of people have expressed suspicions about the written draft, alleging that it came prepared and written outside of Iraq by the Americans or others; the truth is that 3 Iraqis wrote the first draft for the Oil & Gas,” Ghadban said. He said that three persons who wrote the draft, “were, Tareq Shafiq, Farouq al-Qassim al-Iraqi, residing in Norway, and Thamir al-Ghadban, being the first draft that was offered to the government by the Ministry of Oil in 2007,” pointing out that the draft was written in English, because one of its authors did not know good enough Arabic to write the draft in the necessary form.