Gasoline Crisis in Iraq (corruption, unpaid bills)

[Barrett808]

Gasoline Crisis in Iraq
by Pratap Chatterjee, Special to CorpWatch
February 8th, 2006

Contract mismanagement and possible corruption in the Iraqi government are fueling a crisis over international gasoline delivery into Iraq. Citing a mountain of unpaid bills, the governments of Turkey and Saudi Arabia have shut off gasoline exports to Iraq. With it's options dwindling and beleaguered Iraqis demanding fuel, Baghdad has begun to negotiate with former arch-rival, Iran. Meanwhile, hundreds of irate Iraqi security guards, who work for the gasoline delivery companies, are threatening to protest along the Kuwait border to demand payment.

Government officials in Baghdad and Washington claim that the cause of the gasoline shortage is "insurgent" or "terrorist" activity but the trucking companies say that the problem is often corruption and common criminal activity.

Iraq's gasoline comes from two sources: domestic refineries process a limited amount of the nation's crude into gasoline, but it is imports from neighboring nations that run most of the country's vehicles and generators. Saudi Arabia and Turkey supply more than half of Iraq's domestic needs. In August 2005, after Iraq's debt rose into the millions, Saudi Arabia turned off the spigot. On January 21st, after Baghdad's unpaid bill topped a billion dollars, Turkey stopped loading gasoline for Iraq.

The supply from Kuwait is also drying up. Lloyd-Owen International (LOI), a Florida-based company, had arranged to truck in 1.3 billion liters of gasoline from the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation to gas stations throughout Iraq over the last 19 months. On February 2, Alan Waller, chief executive officer of LOI, stopped supplies to Baghdad because of payment arrears. By this weekend, Iraq's imports had plummeted from the previous norm of 12 million liters a day to three million.

In a strongly worded letter he emailed to this weekend to Thomas Delare, the economic counselor at the United States embassy in Baghdad, Waller wrote: "The government of Iraq is unwilling to pay what is correctly owed us or even meet to discuss and that we cannot get any assistance from the U.S. administration in order to help. As such, I can only step back and pull all my international staff out of Iraq for their own safety and let the Iraqi people deal with the situation in their own way."

(more)

http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=13249

[Skink]

1. Can't Iran just annex Iraq so we can go home.

[leesa]

2. It's called responsibiltity..and WE made the mess.