Iraq opens oil fields for international bidding

The Shiite-led Iraqi central government says the deals are invalid with no national oil law in place.

Several Democratic senators in the U.S. recently asked the Bush administration to block the Iraqi government’s reported no-bid deals with Western firms until the country finalized the oil law, but the White House refused.

On Monday, Senator Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York, called for an independent audit of the risks those contracts could pose to political progress in Iraq if they are signed without an agreement on how to divide the nation’s oil revenues.

“Signing these deals without a revenue-sharing law is like putting the cart before the horse,” Schumer said.

But Iraqi government spokesman al-Dabbagh said the country had never considered a no-bid process, saying “there was never any intention to award the contracts without a tender.”

Major oil companies distanced themselves from talk of no-bid deals.

“We have been providing services to Iraq from outside the country for a number of years,” said Robert Wine, a spokesman for BP. “We submitted a study of the Rumeila fields several years ago and if the discussions do lead to deal, they will focus on the technical services in that report. We need to clarify — this is not about access to the country’s oil resources, or exploration. It’s a management contract, to provide technical resources.”

On Monday, the Times reported that a small U.S. State Department team helped draw up contracts between the Iraqi Oil Ministry and the five major oil companies reportedly getting no-bid contracts.

State Department spokesman Tom Casey confirmed a small number of U.S. advisers were providing “technical support” to the Iraqi Oil Ministry. But he said “they are not there to try and give the Iraqis any kind of specific requests or to make decisions or to even push in an individual direction.”

Casey said the decision by the Iraqis not to announce contracts for several Western firms Monday was their own and not influenced by Washington.

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