The Kashagan stitch-up: update to the Hellfire Economics briefing paper
Publisher: CEE Bankwatch Network
Volume: 6 pages, pdf
Description:
Late on Sunday 13 January, the Kazakhstan government reached agreement with international oil companies on revised terms for extraction of the Kashagan oilfield, apparently bringing six months of dispute to an end. Kashagan, in the shallow waters of the north Caspian Sea, is the world’s largest untapped oilfield, and is being developed by a consortium of European, American and Japanese oil companies, led by the Italian Eni. Our December 2007 briefing paper, Hellfire Economics, showed how the contract for developing the field, signed in 1997, was heavily weighted in favour of the oil companies. It argued that they took advantage of Kazakhstan’s weakness in the immediate post-Soviet period to lock the country into unfair terms for 40 years.