Senegalese Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko officially set up Monday, August 19, a commission tasked with reviewing the oil and gas contracts the country signed with multinational corporations.
The PM made the announcement on national TV insisting that the team of legal, tax, and energy sector experts will work meticulously to make sure all legal aspects are carefully examined.
Sonko brushed off rumours of nationalisation reiterating his government’s ambition to rebalance the energy contracts in the national interest.
The move comes after Senegal became an oil producer. Australia’s Woodside Energy announced in June that its Sangomar oil and gas field had produced its first oil.
Gas production from the GTA project should also kick off this year.
It remains to be seen what the commission’s recommendations will be and in the event of negotiations if the expected changes can be implemented.
The move was a campaign promise of the Faye administration.
Iran’s hard-line parliament on Wednesday approved all members of reformist President Masoud Pezeshkian’s Cabinet, the first time in over two decades a leader has been able to get all of his officials through the body.
The approval marks an early win for Pezeshkian, a longtime lawmaker who found himself catapulted into the presidency after a helicopter crash in May killed his predecessor.
Getting his officials approved shows Pezeshkian picked a Cabinet of consensus with names palatable to all of the power centers within Iran’s theocracy, as opposed to going for controversial choices as well.
“Let’s join hands for Iran, for the people, for our country,” he said in Parliament.
Among those in Pezeshkian’s new Cabinet is Abbas Araghchi, 61, a career diplomat who will be Iran’s new foreign minister.
Araghchi was a member of the Iranian negotiating team that reached a nuclear deal with world powers in 2015 that capped Tehran’s nuclear program in return for the lifting of sanctions.
In 2018, then-President Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of the deal and imposed more sanctions on Iran.
Pezeshkian said during his presidential campaign that he would try to revive the nuclear deal.
