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Baghdad: Iraq's Kurdish regional government plans to invite foreign bids on 40 new oil blocks in anticipation that a new national oil law will be agreed upon soon.
In a statement posted on the Kurdish authority's website on Friday, it detailed plans for investor conferences in Erbil, London and possibly Houston to discuss the tendering process.
"Priority will go to those companies which can move and organise themselves quickly," it quoted oil minister Ashti Hawrami as saying. "This way we shall be making a great contribution to Iraq's revenues to be shared by all, hence assisting with the reconciliation process and Iraq's unity," he said.
Kurdish officials last month reached an agreement with the central government in Baghdad over the fair sharing of oil revenues from the country's oil fields, a major plank of a long-awaited new hydro-carbon law.
Wealth sharing
The draft, crucial to regulating how wealth from Iraq's huge reserves will be shared by its sectarian and ethnic groups, was approved by the cabinet in February but faced stiff opposition from the Kurds, who felt they were getting a bad deal.
Most oil reserves in Iraq are in the Kurdish north and Shi'ite south.
Important areas remained to be thrashed out, including annexes in the draft that Kurds say are unconstitutional because they wrest oilfields from regional governments and place them under a new national state oil company.
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