"China’s targets in Somalia seem to have been truly underestimated by the State Department. Chinese thirst for Somalia’s rich Oil resources may soon herald a shift in Tigray Tyrant Zenawi’s foreign policy; this sort of tyrants are able to develop instinctive survival thoughts and short-term survival considerations.
- "If America starts speaking about Human Rights in 2007 ‘Ethiopia’, we will strike a strategic alliance with China" seems to think this trash of criminal Zenawi.
If this comes to happen, it will be a long-term disaster for the US. This is the reason a US reconsideration of the American Horn of Africa policy has become an urgent matter. And the Chinese are there! In Somalia!"
Last July, the Transitional President of Somalia (in the Somali South) Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed, a miserable ‘Ethiopian’ puppet and most loathsome figure among today’s Somalis, was allowed to negotiate a contract with the Chinese state-owned China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC), the same firm that one year earlier had been forced to back off a takeover of Unocal under pressure from a broad bipartisan group in the U.S. Congress, as well as the smaller China International Oil and Gas (CIOG) Group.
It is noteworthy to remember that in November 2006, when the Transitional Federal Government of that unrepresentative bogus-president was besieged at Baidoa by the Islamists, he had traveled to CNOOC headquarters in China to ratify the deal with the Oil group’s chairman and chief executive officer, Fu Chengyu. And last June, when special envoys from the US did their best to support the ‘national conference’, Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government "energy minister" Abdullahi Yusuf Mohamad was in Nairobi, Kenya, joyfully chatting with Chen Zhuobiao, Head of CNOOC operations in Africa in order to put the final touches on the deal’s technical details.
The most critical point in the Chinese – unrepresentative Somali deal is precisely the location of the targeted oil field, which does not lie in Southern Somalia where the US idiotically try to support the loathsome ‘Ethiopian’ Transitional Federal Government of 'Somalia'. The oilfield is located in the Mudug region of the semi-autonomous northwestern region of Puntland, which was considered as the traditional fief of Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed’s Darod clan.
In the 1980s, a number of Western firms, including Conoco-Phillips (then two separate enterprises), Chevron, British Petroleum, Royal Dutch Shell, and Italy’s Eni S.p.a., held exploration concessions in Somalia and, according to some estimates, invested more than $150 million in onshore geological studies before they were forced to shut down operations with the collapse of the state.
Now, Range Resources Ltd. has concluded from data collected by earlier firms as well as field studies that it has managed to conduct in recent years thanks to its close ties with Puntland’s rulers that the potential yield may be as high as 10 billion barrels, thus making the Mudug field alone worth more than $700 billion.
The deal gives the Chinese firms 49 percent of the profits with the rest supposed to go to the Transitional Federal Government. In addition, the Transitional Federal Government will receive a bonus of $50 million for any wells which yield more than 200,000 barrels a day for seventy-five consecutive days.
It has also been reported that a deal was in the works to sell a 49 percent stake in the nascent Somali 'state' petroleum firm that would be vested with the 51 percent share of the Chinese deal to Indonesia’s state-owned PT Medco Energi Internasional Tbk and Kuwait Energy Company (also known as Zahra Oil and Gas KSCC), a privately-held enterprise.
Although the venture may now look somewhat risky for the Chinese firms because of Somalia’s Civil War, one should rather estimate the result in case the deal meets success at the end. Questions may vary in this case from the possibility of another President in Puntland, and the longevity of the Transitional Federal Government in the Somali South, to the possible relationship between Puntland and Somalia’s unrepresentative Transitional Federal Government.
If the former allows the latter to materialize the illegal - due to the lack of representativity of the Transitional Federal Government - Oil exploitation, Puntland will be deprived of its most significant resources, kept out of its exploitation, and above all, dtripped of any and every sense of legitimacy".
http://www.buzzle.com/articles/us-china ... frica.html
