The republic’s government made this assessment of the ecological damage, caused by oil pumpers at Kazakhstan’s oil deposit. The size of the complaints leave no doubt that the Italian company Eni will meet the same fate as the English-Dutch Shell, which was banned from the Sahalin-2 project by the Russian government because of ecological violations.
Daulet Yergozhin, the republic’s deputy minister for finance, who is in charge of supervising the financial side of negotiations with Eni, spoke on the topic, “We are talking about tens of billions of dollars. Of course it’s more than 10 billion dollars, but the project is planned to last 40 years.And it’s not a cost per year. The sum may get larger and we are counting because it can influence economic development, the GDP and there might be a chain reaction. The day before on Friday, Yegorzhin stated during an interview with the Wall Street Journal that Kazakhstan would react positively to the change of oil pumpers to a local company, since it is dissatisfied with Eni.
Kazakhstan’s bone to pick with the consortium Agip KCO, which includes Eni, Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil and Total, holders of 18.5% of stock, ConocoPhillips with 9.3 % as well as the Japanese Inpex and Kazakh government company Kazmunaigas is all because Agip has repeatedly postponed oil pumping and increase spending for development of the deposit. At the end of August, Kazakhstan suspended the development of Kashagan for three months and pressed charges against the consortium with Eni at the head for ecological and customs violations. The government also announced that it would demand and increase in it’s share of profits from 10% to 40%.
Ali Aliyev
http://eng.expert.ru/articles/2007/09/04/kashagan-eni/ |
