London – A second tanker load of Kurdish oil has been safely delivered to buyers and two more vessels are being loaded at the Turkish port of Ceyhan, the Ministry of Natural Resources in Erbil announced.
The MNR has so far not identified the buyers of the first consignments of crude to be shipped through the new pipeline to Ceyhan in recent weeks. However, Reuters news agency reported on Friday that the first cargo of KRG oil aboard the SCF Altai was due to be offloaded at the Israeli port of Ashkelon.
The ship-tracking service MarineTraffic on Saturday showed the 80,000-tonne Liberian-flagged tanker moored at Ashkelon port.
Israeli officials told Reuters they did not comment on the origin of crude oil imported by private refineries in Israel. The agency said it was not able to confirm whether the KRG sold the oil directly to a buyer in Israel or to another party. It noted that cargoes often changed hands multiple times before reaching their final destination.
The Erbil ministry said the first two consignments sold were each of around one million barrels.
“We are proud of this milestone achievement, which was accomplished despite almost three weeks of intimidation and baseless interferences from Baghdad against the tanker-ship owners and the related international traders and buyers,” the ministry statement said.
It went on to outline the KRG’s legal case for shipping oil directly from fields within its territory, countering Baghdad’s claims that all Iraqi crude must pass through the State Oil Marketing Organization (SOMO).
Reasserting a position that natural resources minister Ashti Hawrami put to Western officials and oil industry executives in London this week, the statement said the KRG was acting fully within its authorities under the 2005 Iraqi constitution.
By interfering with exports of oil from Kurdistan, Baghdad was acting “grossly outside its limited authorities” under the constitution, which made no mention of a federal oil ministry or of SOMO, the statement added.
It said the oil was being exported in full accordance with the KRG’s legal prerogatives. These included a provision that allows the KRG to retain the proceeds of petroleum sales in circumstances where the federal government was not sharing revenues in accordance with the federal constitution.
Hawrami said in London this week, addressing the Iraq Petroleum Conference, that the KRG’s agreed 17 per cent of the national budget had dwindled to 10 per cent before being cut to 0 per cent by Baghdad.
He said the KRG had been obliged to borrow on the international market to cover its expenditure.
The statement from his ministry, distributed on Friday, said Baghdad had been attempting to use old, Saddam-era laws, which were no longer valid, to threatened potential buyers of Kurdish crude. That merely served to underline the lack of express federal authority under the constitution.
