Tripoli, 3 November:
The Special Committee on Budget Preparation has begun discussions on the budget for the oil and gas ministry for . . .[restrict]2013.
In purely financial terms, the ministry is overwhelmingly the most important in Libya, with revenues from hydrocarbons being used to fund the budgets of almost every other department.
When the 2012 budget was announced in March, hydrocarbons were expected to bring in net revenues of 65.29 billion dinars for the year, compared with just 3.2 billion dinars forecast from other sources including taxation, stamp duty, Central Bank profits and profits from the two nationalised telephone operators. In spite of predictions of a budget deficit, the government was able to announce a balanced budget of 68.52 billion dinars.
Thursday’s deliberations by the Special Committee on Budget Preparation were chaired by Ministry of Oil and Gas undersecretary Omar Shekmak. The committee reviewed and discussed a number of topics and items relating to the estimated financial steering budgets of salaries, payments and capital productivity of development, drilling, exploration, surveys and marketing.
Shekmak also used the meeting to highlight the importance of bringing more young people into the sector and addressing the gender imbalance between men and women.
“We aim to qualify young people and prepare them as potential future leaders”, Shekmak said. “We want to increase their numbers to enable them to play a future role in financial and technical committees such as this”.
The undersecretary said that the conclusions of the committee would be submitted to the oil and gas minister at the next meeting with the NOC board of directors, adding that he was confident the budget would be submitted for consideration by the ministry of finance on time. [/restrict]
