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By Libya Herald reporter.
Tunis, 17 May 2017:
In an attempt to resolve the feud between the National Oil Corporation (NOC) and the German oil company Wintershall, NOC chairman Mustafa Sanalla has asked German ambassador Christian Buck to mediate and ensure the company restarts production from its eight oil fields in the eastern Sirte basin.
The NOC insists that in 2010 it and Wintershall signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) under which that in return for extending the company’s 1956 concession, due to run out in 2016, it accept converting it to the type of Exploration and Production Sharing Agreement (ESPA) under which all other foreign oil companies in Libya operate.
Sanalla now accuses Wintershall of reneging on the agreement , the terms of which, though, are seen as less favourable than the old one. He has also accused it of collusion with the Presidency Council (PC) in the drafting of the latter’s Resolution 270 which took taken from NOC the power away to negotiate ESPAs. Most of the meeting with the ambassador is said to have focused on the dispute.
Sanalla told Buck that he was pleased to see that the Benghazi Appeals Court had ruled Resolution 270 was not lawful, though he admitted problems associated with it were not over yet.
So far PC leader Faiez Serraj has ignored the court ruling.
As a result of the dispute, Wintershall has been excluded since March from loading plans at the Zueitina terminal from which it normally ships its crude because of the dispute. Consequently, Sanalla has said, production of more than 160,000 b/d was being lost, at a cost to the Libyan state of almost a quarter of a billion dollars a month.
