Kirkuk governor urges coordination over oil contracts

KIRKUK / IraqiNews.com: Kirkuk’s governor on Wednesday stressed the necessity of coordination with its local council and government with regards to oil exploration contracts. “We call on the federal government and the Iraqi Ministry of oil to coordinate with Kirkuk’s provincial council and local government when signing contracts for the production and exploitation of oil in the province to ensure transparency of the contracts,” Governor Razkar Ali said in a press release received by IraqiNews.com news agency. The governor urged the federal government and the ministry to give due attention to the matter. One week ago, an official spokesperson for the Iraqi governorment, Ali al-Dabbagh, said that the cabinet would submit a draft law to give every oil producing province $0.5 U.S. dollar for each barrel of oil it produces, in accordance with Article 121 of the constitution. Kirkuk, 250 km (156 miles) north of the Iraqi capital Baghdad, sits on the ruins of a 5,000-year-old settlement. Because of the strategic geographical location of the city, Kirkuk was the battle ground for three empires, Assyria, Babylonia and Media which controlled the city at various times. Kirkuk is the centre of the northern Iraqi petroleum industry. It is a historically and ethnically mixed city populated by Assyrians, Kurds, Arabs and Iraqi Turkmen. The population was estimated at 1,200,000 in 2008. SS (S) 1