Other than that, the Maliki government has gone some way towards compromise with the Kurds on oil export. Whether it has gone all the way, as Maliki appeared to promise in an early-February interview when he said that the KRG oil contracts had been fully approved, simply remains unclear in the current budget. Maliki recently backtracked in a televised press conference and put the taped video on his website, thereby seemingly reverting to the previous agreement between the oil ministry in Baghdad and the Kurdish authorities of paying costs but not profits for the foreign companies. As expected, the key numbers pertaining to this issue are not included in the budget law as such, and even in the annexes – not yet published by parliament – they are unlikely to specify the exact payment that will be given to the foreign companies. But it is interesting that in a leaked version of these numbers that has failed to receive much attention, from the Sumaria news agency on 9 February, a heading of around 2.05 trillion ID was set aside as “contribution to the costs of exporting oil including entitlements under the contracts signed with foreign companies in Arbil”.
المساهمة في كلفة انتاج النفط الخام المصدر بضمنها مستحقات عقود شركات النفط الأجنبية في إقليم اربيل
It is noteworthy that this heading, without the Kurdistan portion, has featured in Iraqi budgets going back at least to 2008, and has increased annually – apparently from 800 billion ID in 2008 via 1.3 trillion ID last year. Thus the increase from last year may well reflect some natural growth in the cost of oil production in other parts of Iraq on top of payment for the Kurdish exports. At any rate, total Iraqi exports are estimated at 800 million barrels for 2011, meaning this allocation of money, the equivalent of USD 1.7 billion, should add up to around 2 dollars per barrel on average, though with Maliki having recently acknowledged a greater per-barrel cost for Kurdistan than the rest of Iraq, and with that leaked budget draft certainly making reference to “contracts”. Additionally, there was also a significant heading of 3.2 trillion ID for unspecified “investment projects of the foreign oil companies”. Again, these numbers relate to a leaked version of the full budget from 10 days ago; today some confusion has been thrown into the mix by a Reuters report to the effect that the budget supposedly includes “$2.05 billion to pay oil firms investment costs” which sounds very similar to the 2.05 trillion ID reported on 9 February except that they applied to Iraq’s total exports. It is impossible to verify this before the annexes to the budget are published; in 2010 some annexes weren’t published at all. (Update: Figures more or less similar to those reported by Sumaria on 9 February have now been confirmed by sources that have seen the final annexes. The “investment projects” are thought to relate to contracts signed by Baghdad for the south and hence the share of the firms operating in Kurdistan is presumably to be taken from the USD 1.7 billion heading for general export costs.)
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