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H15603

Headlines : Human Rights

Summary:

Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa on Thursday signed a decree raising the state’s share of windfall oil profits from 50% to 99%. A spokesman for one of the companies affected said:
This really took everybody by surprise and we don’t have an official position at the moment.

As far as I know this gentleman and his fellow oil executives are neither deaf nor blind so the surprise must be similar to that engendered by seeing the Sun come up each morning. Since becoming President in January, Rafael Correa has taken his country on the same path as several neighbors, notably Evo Morales in Bolivia and Hugo Chavez in Venezuela.

Interviewed during the election campaign, he set out his agenda:
Many of the oil contracts are a true entrapment for the country. Of every five barrels of oil that the multinationals produce, they leave only one for the state and take four… That is absolutely unacceptable. We’re going to revise and renegotiate the contracts.

[Posted By Watson]

By Alonso Soto
Republished from Reuters

Correa takes the Chavez route

Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa on Thursday signed a decree to give the state almost all the extra oil revenues generated for foreign firms by high prices, sparking worries of more government control over the Andean country’s key sector.

The decree raised the state share to 99 percent from 50 percent of “extraordinary revenues” produced by foreign oil companies above a set, contractual benchmark price.

The government expects to receive around $700 million annually from the hike, which will affect the country’s largest investors, Brazil’s Petrobras and Spain’s Repsol, as well as France’s Perenco, China’s Andes Petroleum and U.S.-owned City Oriente .

The surprise announcement by left-winger Correa echoed measures introduced by Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez to increase state participation in his country’s petroleum industry as part of his self-styled socialist revolution.

[end excerpt]

Click here to read the rest of the article

Posted by Watson

RECENT COMMENTS

its times like these people begin to discover who their friends aren’t.

is it just my imagination but are these oil supplying countries lining up to kick a certain group of people square in the nuts?

antiguanoctane @ 10/05/07 17:28:37

We need to change the paradigms of capitalism to eliminate the methodology of genocide. I suspect there are many more states out there that are thinking they’d like to have a democracy like this new kind of democracy and not so much like the one that is currently being inflicted on the people of Iraq.

The more we make it clear that the right thing to do is to have a government that leverages state resources for the benefit of that state’s people — the better.

The fact that the people of the United States, so famous for that now bizarrely somehow nonexistent constitution, not only can not get their supposed government by and for the people TF out of Iraq — but have just “consented” to pay an international consortium of death squads for hire HALF A TRILLION dollars . . . oh yeh, with a little money left over to deploy the total surveillance society needed to ensure that no one does anything out of line. Now that most of them no longer have any way to earn an honest living. . .

kind of leaves a void that needs to be filled.

Luckily, we got some folks that appear to be up to the challenge.

Yay!

microdot @ 10/05/07 19:38:10

99% . . . that oughta fund some conservation programs.

Not to mention further investigations into the caustic properties of glyphosate.

Sounds like jobs to moi.

Career paths even. Dreams for little kids!

Currently starving in the streets of Quito