Libya’s state National Oil Corporation (NOC) reported today that, through its Strategic Partnership Forum for Oil and Gas, held in Tunis yesterday under the slogan “Towards sustainable development and increasing production”, it had succeeded in laying the first building block for a strong and promising partnership with the private sector.
Formation of a working group
At the event, it reported that a working group was formed with the membership of three members representing private sector companies in the western, eastern and southern regions. The working group will communicate with the NOC to follow up on the results and recommendations of the forum and the mechanisms of their implementation. The members of the working group were selected by consensus between more than 150 representatives and representatives of the participating concerned companies at the Forum.
The recommendations of the forum
The recommendations of the forum stressed the importance of building a strong and sustainable private sector to support the Libyan economy, adopting policies that support partnership and pave the way for increasing production and achieving sustainable development, and working to establish an energy bank to support companies operating in the field of oil and gas and facilitate financial transactions, while settling the debts accumulated by private companies over the past years.
Need for implementation of the recommendations
The recommendations focused on the need to expedite the activation of the communication team that was selected during its closing session to follow up on the implementation of the recommendations and to develop a permanent mechanism for communication between the NOC and the private sector to ensure continuous coordination, while maintaining the organization of such a forum periodically to assess progress and discuss emerging challenges.
NOC to measure its private sector participation
For his part, NOC Chairman, Farhat Bengdara, issued his directives to the Office of Strategic Programmes to add a new performance measurement indicator (KPI) within the current performance indicators of the corporation’s subsidiaries, which measures the percentage of the amounts contracted (procurement) by these companies with private sector companies annually out of the total budget value allocated to each company.
Discussions at the forum
The forum devoted its first session to exchanging views on the current existing policies and analysing the current situation regarding the most prominent challenges. The second session witnessed an extensive dialogue on the current challenges of the private sector’s partnership with the NOC and reviewing the most important factors affecting this partnership in increasing production and developing the sector.
In its third session, the forum also discussed the mechanisms of cooperation between the NOC and the private sector and finding the most important alternatives to the influencing factors. This was followed by an interactive workshop to develop a common vision for this partnership, which resulted in many ideas, initiatives and constructive proposals to improve cooperation mechanisms. These will be taken into account in formulating the final form of the terms, conditions and restrictions of this promising partnership.
The first NOC forum with private sector companies will be held in Tunis on 23 November
