news from iraq

"Iraq is the largest ever emerging market that you can think of," Deputy Prime Minister Barham Saleh told journalists at the World Economic Forum on the Middle East in Egypt's Sharm el-Sheikh.
"There is nothing in Iraq that doesn't require investment, but the state cannot solve it and so we look seriously to the private sector."
He said that Iraq was predicting 70 billion dollars in oil revenue this year, with reserves that "could well exceed" 350 billion barrels, and with the International Monetary Fund slating eight percent growth in 2008.
"It hasn't taken off yet, but when it does take off, it will be very fast," Saleh said of the country's economy. Vaunting Iraq's investment opportunities, Saleh said that a tender to turn a large former army garrison in Baghdad into housing had seen "applications from 30 major international companies, mostly from the Gulf and Egypt."
But Saleh, a former prime minister of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan-run region of Iraqi Kurdistan, stressed that the private sector would itself have to do what the state was unable to accomplish.
"After decades of mismanagement we need to call a spade a spade and admit that the state can't do it," he said of the oil sector.

He admitted that confusion remained for foreign companies wanting to invest in oil exploration and exploitation in the north of the country -- over which authority to sign the contracts with, Baghdad or the Kurdistan regional government.
And Saleh said a national oil law to resolve the problem would not be finalised any time soon. "We will examine efforts to bring this (oil law) to a close but I caution against it being resolved soon," he said. Oil Minister Hussein al-Shahristani said in February that he hoped an oil law would be finalised this year.
The government in Baghdad and the authorities in the autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq have been at loggerheads for months over contracts signed between the Kurds and foreign oil companies.
The autonomous Kurdish regional government in northern Iraq has signed 15 exploration and export contracts with 20 international companies since it passed its own oil law last August, infuriating the Baghdad government. Shahristani has repeatedly said that he considers these contracts "illegal." While appealing for foreign investment and saying that the security situation had improved "in many respects," Saleh admitted that he could not yet tell Iraqis living abroad to come home. "More and more are coming back, though not in droves," he said. "But I'm not going to declare Iraq as safe and secure as