Page 9 - AfrOil Week 09 2020

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 According to Finance Minister Ken Ofori-Atta, the parties have yet to reach an agreement on the matter but are likely to do so soon. He did not say when a deal might be forthcoming, but he did stress that Ghanaian authorities were not trying to derail the acquisition.
Rather, he said, Accra wants to be sure that it acquires an appropriate share of the estimated $2.5bn in capital gains that Occidental will make from the sale. Ghanaian tax authorities have estimated that the state’s portion will amount to about $500mn, he stated.
“It’s an issue of seeking what’s in the sale for Ghana,” Ofori-Atta told Bloomberg. “It’s not any sort of a bellicose action.”
The finance minister was speaking shortly after Kobina Tahir Hammond, a Ghanaian leg- islator who previously served as deputy energy minister, told Business24 that the dispute had arisen because the US company had refused to give Accra its share of the capital gains. “What the government is saying [is] very simple: Pay up and you can go. But they say they will not pay. I have their letters indicating they will not pay,” he alleged.
Ghana’s demands are reasonable, Hammond asserted. Anadarko has earned about $4.5bn in Ghana over the last 13 years, so the request for $500mn is not excessive, he argued.
As of press time, neither Occidental nor Total had commented on the Ghanaian officials’ remarks.
Representatives of the US company said last week during a conference call on the latest earnings report that they were still working with the government of Ghana to wrap up the sale of assets owned by Occidental. Similarly, Total’s CEO Patrick Pouyanne was quoted as saying last month that Occidental had yet to complete talks with Accra on the tax implications of the transaction.
Occidental is trying to unload the stakes in Jubilee and TEN – along with fields in South Africa, Mozambique and Algeria – as a con- dition of its acquisition of Anadarko. It has pledged to sell off $15bn worth of the latter firm’s assets by the middle of this year and has said it hopes to use the proceeds of the sales to pay off some of the debt it incurred when purchasing Anadarko. ™
Tullow and its partners are using an FPSO vessel to develop the TEN block (Photo: MODEC)
Somalia working with Shell, ExxonMobil to update 1990 deals
SOMALIA’S Ministry of Petroleum and Nat- ural Resources is working with ExxonMobil (US) and Royal Dutch Shell (UK/Netherlands) to resolve the status of several offshore blocks to which it was originally granted access in 1990.
The ministry said in a statement on March 2 that it had teamed up with the two interna- tional oil companies (IOCs) to draw up plans for moving towards the conversion of earlier
agreements covering the blocks into produc- tion-sharing agreements (PSAs) that comply with Somalia’s new Petroleum Law. This road map will expand on the agreement that the par- ties signed in Amsterdam last June, it explained.
Under the Amsterdam agreement, it added, Shell and ExxonMobil have made a payment of $1.7mn to Somalia’s federal government to cover the charges incurred since 1990.
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