By Ahmed Elumami.
Tripoli, 29 May 2013:
The Prime Minister has confirmed that the National Oil Company (NOC) will move to Benghazi. “We . . .[restrict]will start to build a headquarters for the National Oil Corporation in Benghazi soon, and most of the staff will be transferred to it,” he announced at a press conference on Wednesday.
The issue of returning the NOC to Benghazi, demanded by a broad cross section of society in the city, has rumbled on for over a year.
In an attempt to placate Benghazi it was announced last year that it would be transferred back from the capital but this was almost instantly rescinded following protests by staff at NOC’s Tripoli headquarters, refusing to move.
Since then, there have been various efforts at a compromise, the main suggestion being that the NOC would be split into two, a refining and marketing operation and an exploration and production company, the former to be based in Benghazi and the latter in Tripoli. There was even at one point a suggestion of creating a third operation in Sebha.
This has satisfied no one – not Benghazi nor the NOC staff in Tripoli who are known to be opposed to any separation or any move.
Mohamed Al-Ansari, from the NOC’s media office, today told the Libya Herald that Deputy Oil Minister Omar Shakmak had denied that Zeidan said the headquarters would move to Benghazi. He said that what was meant was that a representative office of NOC would be opened there. However yesterday, Shakmak was quoted by Reuters saying very definitively that “the headquarters will be in Benghazi,” providing that a restructuring plan was approved by Congress.
For her part, Congresswoman Fawzia Karwan, a member of the Energy Committee, says there is a plan to create a new organisation which she called the Libyan Corporation for Manufacturing and Exploration. It would be based in Benghazi. (The company to which she was referring is thought to be the planned Libyan Corporation for Refining and Downstream Operations.)
A branch of the new corporation would be set up in Tripoli, she told the Libya Herald, just as the NOC would have a representative office in Benghazi. The aim is to decentralise.
Karwan added that the Committee had met with the Oil Minister Abdulbari Al-Arusi as well as Benghazi Congress members to discuss the issue and that it was pointed out that a transfer of the NOC as a whole would involve a major financial loss for the ministry.
“Benghazi will not get any benefit from transferring the NOC there”, she added, “because employees from the western region will follow the corporation and there will be no opportunity to appoint employees from Benghazi and the eastern part of Libya”.
However, it would be different with the Libyan Corporation for Manufacturing. It would be independent of the NOC. It would aid Benghazi’s economic recovery, she said, because all production and exploration companies would also move to in Benghazi. [/restrict]
