Iraqi Parliament Sets Ball Rolling for Autonomous South Region

12 October 2006 The Iraqi parliament on Wednesday approved a controversial law which sets out the procedures for the country’s 18 provinces to hold referendums to merge themselves into larger federal regions with a measure of self government. Although the powers of the autonomous regions would include signing their own oil deals with international oil companies, they would have to wait until 2008 when the new law goes into effect….

Federalism or Bust

15 September 2006 The debate over Iraqi devolution, which many regard as synonymous with carving the country up into autonomous mini states, has started. The principle was enshrined in the Iraqi constitution adopted last year. But as the stuttering launch of the parliamentary debate underlines, it’s not just the local drivers of the proposal — mainly Shiite groupings and, to a lesser extent, Kurds — whose interests are involved, regional…

Hussein Al-Shahristani

The Iraqi oil minister talks oil with Ruba Husari:

Q. You launched your first licensing round Jun. 30 with an ambitious schedule to award contracts by June 2009. In view of Iraq’s problems, is this timetable realistic?

HS: It is ambitious, but we are talking about producing fields, where production profiles and other data are already available, and most of the international companies that intend to bid for those fields have a lot of data, so the time required to familiarize themselves is much shorter than if we were talking about non-developed fields. We think one year is enough. We gave the companies six months to prepare their bids and we told them to start preparing from now. Iraq lost big investment opportunities in the last five years as a result of the security situation and political differences. We cannot afford to waste any more time, and we aim to complete this process within a year. We will also launch a second licensing round before the first one is completed. Once the data packages are out in September and while companies prepare their bids, which are due in March 2009, we will have time to prepare for the launch of the second round.