Eric Watkins
Senior Correspondent
LOS ANGELES, Apr. 17 -- Chad has delayed its halt to oil production, a threat it made last week to protest the World Bank's freezing of funds held by Citibank in London.
Communications Minister Hourmadji Moussa Doumgor said Chad will shut down its oil production at the end of April and not midmonth if the World Block does not unfreeze its account.
"The Chadian government has decided to wait to turn off the taps until the end of American mediation," Doumgor said in a statement.
Doumgor said Chad's prime minister met with the US ambassador "to announce that the government gives a favorable reception to the offer of mediation from the American government and that it has decided to give more time for mediation according to the timetable set out by the US State Department—that is to say, until the end of April."
That statement appeared to countermand remarks over the weekend by Oil Minister Mahamat Nasser Hassan who said that the crucial 1,000-km pipeline, which extends through Cameroon to the Gulf of Guinea, would be shut down on Apr. 18 unless an ExxonMobil Corp.-led consortium paid $100 million the government says it is owed.
That threat was understood to be a way around the impasse created by the World Bank's freezing of the Citibank account.
The Chadian government originally set Apr. 18 as the date for stopping its oil production over the disagreement, which began in January when the World Bank suspended an aid package and then had the Citibank account frozen, in punishment for Chad's change of a law which had allocated a share of the oil revenues for social spending (OGJ, Feb. 13, 2006, p. 19).
The government claimed it changed the law because it needed to access the funds more quickly to cover other priorities, including spending on security.
The confrontation with the World Bank came as insurgents, allegedly seeking to oust President Idriss Déby and disrupt elections scheduled for May 3, last week attacked N'Djamena, the Chadian capital. Government forces repulsed the attack after several hours of fighting.
Contact Eric Watkins at [email protected].
