Chapter 3
"New oil law will lead to 'transparent and fair' competition: Iraqi minister"
The Canadian Press, Sun Jan 21, 12:02 PM
http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/capress/070121/business/iraq_oil_law
As the Iraq oil minister sought to restore the conference of the foreign investors, he said a new draft for the hydrocarbon law is to make a start for a "transparent and fair" competition in bids to develop Iraq's oil wealth. If the new law is approved, he expects it to stimulate foreign oil campanies with their investment clout and technology will modernize Iraq's oil sector. Therefore, Iraq will be able to meet the country's goal, which is to double the current immature production of 2.5 million barrels per day by the year of 2010.
There will be more oil fields added as foreign companies submit their bids, and companies will be chosen according to their capabilities of modern technologies to guarantee Iraq will gain the most benefits. Also, the oil ministry emphasises that the profit made will be sharing among all the Iraqis. A central fund will be formed, and revenue made from the oil are all require to go to the fund. The central fund will then distributed to Iraqis in every region and province according to population.
Relation to Chapter 3
This article is related to chapter three because the government is giving up the oil fields to foreign companies to help them gain more and better benefits. One of the reasons that the government are not selling the oil fields to their local companies is because they don't think the local companies have the technology or money to gain the most benefit from the potential oil fields. The oil ministry also said they will be forming a central fund, which is to gather oil revenue and distributing them to Iraqis in every region and province according to population. The central fund is a third party effect, because the money distributed to the regions and provinces is probably end up going to education, health care, and as we all probably can guess, military power.
On the other hand, we can see the government is already starting to regulate things before the oil fields are being sold. Reason might be that since they couldn't keep the oil fields for themselves, they still want to gain the most profit and benefits from the foreign companies. Though the government announced that the new oil laws that they are setting up now are trying to make the competition for the oil field bidders more "transparent and fair". This sentence is definitely not anything new to most of us probably, since we can always hear it when any government are making new laws to regulate things. It is always making things fair and equal, but usually they would gain the most benefit out of all.
