US oil major Chevron and Malaysia's Petronas will pay Chad $281.6 million under a deal to end a tax dispute which saw them threatened with expulsion from the central African country, the government said.
The deal, reached during talks in the capital N'Djamena this week, includes a $64 million exceptional tax credit for the companies, the government said in a statement late on Friday. "Chevron and Petronas have agreed to pay companies tax totalling $281,649,974 for 2005 and three quarters of 2006," it said.
Chad's President Idriss Deby said in August the two companies had refused to pay 250 billion CFA francs ($484.8 million) which the government said it was owed under a 2000 taxation agreement.
The statement said the government still had to give its official approval to the deal, and the payments would be made within seven days of that happening. It gave no breakdown of what each company would pay. Petronas owns 35 percent of the $4 billion Doba consortium, Chevron 25 percent and operator Exxon Mobil the remaining 40 percent.
Deby had ordered Chevron and Petronas to leave the country in August but relented in September after both said they were prepared to make tax payments, though no figure was given then. Under Friday's deal, the parties agreed to terminate the 2000 agreement whose interpretation was at the centre of the dispute.
Deby has dismissed as "crumbs" the 12.5 percent wellhead value share that Chad receives from the Doba project, which started pumping crude in 2003 and now produces 160,000-170,000 barrels per day.
He has called for the consortium agreement to be renegotiated to grant a new state oil company a stake, echoing a global trend of resource nationalism among producers eager to seize greater control over their energy assets. The Doba project began pumping oil from southern Chad via a pipeline for export from neighbouring Cameroon's Atlantic coast more than 1,000 km (600 miles) away.
The World Bank agreed to provide some funding and, crucially, gave its blessing to the project in return for commitments from Chad to save a portion of its revenues in a special fund set up for future generations.
But the government and parliament, faced with attacks by eastern rebels and burdened by large numbers of refugees from across the border in Sudan's war-racked Darfur region, later modified the oil revenues law.
That prompted a temporary suspension of World Bank loans to Chad this year, before a compromise deal under which the government agreed to spend 70 percent of its 2007 budget on poverty reduction.
The landlocked former French colony is highly impoverished and was ranked as the world's most corrupt country in a survey last year by anti-graft group Transparency International.
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