Iran’s Oil Ministry on Tuesday voiced its readiness to report to Parliament on controversial foreign deals, after the secretary of the watchdog Guardian Council alerted the judiciary to possible cases of bribery in the ministry, said the official Iranian news agency, IRNA.
"The oil ministry officials have said they are ready to present an account of their foreign deals to the [Parliament] after they met with...speaker Mehdi Karroubi Monday night," a statement from Karroubi's office said, cited by the agency.
"Referring to the sensitivity of certain giant deals and projects the oil ministry is currently involved in, the oil ministry officials have expressed concern over...alleged scandals with deal-making," the report added.
The reaction from the oil ministry came after Oil Minister Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati announced "he would be informing the nation's highest judicial authority of immense kickbacks and dubious contracts within the oil ministry."
"I will ask the judiciary chief to follow up on the case and to announce the results after concluding the investigations," Jannati said Monday.
The war of attrition emerged in the country a day after Italian energy group Eni and Iran on Saturday sealed an oilfield contract worth $1 billion in what will be the first test of extra-territorial US sanctions under George W. Bush's presidency, said IRNA.
The agreement is of the "buy-back" type in which the contractor provides all the financial resources and implements the development operation.
Iran is the second-largest exporter in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, at 3.6 million barrels per day.
It is pressing Western companies to defy Washington and invest in its new oil and gas projects, despite opposition from Washington.
European and Asian oil companies since then have secured a number of projects with Iran and are lining up for more, undeterred by the 1996 US Iran-Libya Sanctions Act (ILSA). A group of Iranian MPs earlier warned that Parliament might have to use its "legal right" and probe the oil ministry if the latter did not keep the former privy to its controversial foreign buy-back deals, the agency added.
Parliament has permitted the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) to sign up to $7.5 billion in foreign buy-back deals during the current Iranian fiscal year (started March 21), and has extended earlier permits.
Buy-back deals have come under extensive criticism by some critics in Iran, who claim they could open the door to a sell-off of nation's wealth.
Under a buy-back program, a foreign investor is to recover his investment from products produced.
Buy-backs, though largely unpopular with foreign firms, were resorted to in the mid-1990s in a bid to help the Iranian government skirt constitutional bans on foreign ventures and attract much-needed capital to revamp the aging energy sector, which was damaged by the war with Iraq and later by ongoing US sanctions – Albawaba.com
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