Parliament Gears Up for Oil Exploration, Negotiations to Kick Off

The Parliament held on Tuesday a session to select the members of committees and Parliament’s bureau, An Nahar newspaper reported.

The parliamentary session ended by re-electing the parliament bureau members and making slight changes in the membership of the parliament committees.

As the cabinet is moving forward with plans to exploit the country’s potential maritime resources, Parliament’s joint committees meeting on Monday that was headed by Speaker Nabih Berri unanimously agreed on this step.

PM Najib Miqati, who attended the meeting along with Energy Minister Jebran Bassil, briefed the MPs on the steps undertaken by the cabinet to explore the offshore oil and gas resources.

The Parliament’s joint committees pledged to issue all decrees on the laws authorizing oil and gas exploration before the end of the year, which will allow oil exploration companies to start their work by the beginning of 2012.

Lebanon and Israel locked horns over the maritime border after the discovery of potential offshore energy reserves.

The Israeli cabinet in July approved a map and submitted it to the United Nations, which has been asked to mediate the growing conflict.

An Nahar reported that a meeting was held at the speaker’s office afterwards between the Parliament’s bureau members including MPs: Marwan Hamadah, Ahmed Fatfat, Antoine Zahra and Serge Tor Sarkissian while deputy speaker Farid Makari and MP Michel Moussa were absent for being out of the country.

The daily added that March 14-led opposition members MP Sami Gemayel and Ammar Houri also attended the meeting.

The discussions focused on Tuesday’s parliamentary session set to elect the committees and members of the Parliament’s bureau, the daily said, noting that the gatherers agreed on re-electing all the committees’ members.

However, the pan-Arab daily al-Hayat remarked that the only change will be through replacing MP Hamadah by MP Akram Shehayeb as the head of the Parliament’s Environment Committee. Whereby, every member in the committees who became a minister will be replaced by an MP from his parliamentary bloc.

The joint committees also agreed on delegating Foreign minister Adnan Mansour to Cyprus within 10 days to revive negotiations on Lebanon’s Exclusive Economic Zone.

Negotiations will also begin with Syria to demarcate the maritime borders between the countries.

Lebanon and Cyprus signed in 2007a bilateral agreement delineating the Exclusive Economic Zone between the two countries. But in December of last year, Israel and Cyprus also signed their own EEZ agreement.

Lebanon argues that the agreement allows Israel to infringe on 860 square km of its EEZ.

Lawmakers quoted Berri as saying: “We will not accept considering the 860 sq. km zone an area disputed by Lebanon and the enemy (Israel).”

“We insist on considering it completely Lebanese and to start exploiting oil there,” MPs told al-Hayat.

The gatherers agreed on holding another meeting before the end of the year.

On his part, Minister Bassil stressed on the importance of approving all the decrees related to the laws authorizing oil and gas exploration to allow Lebanon to exploit its resources.

“We have established all the basics that the (oil) exploitation matter needs, the ball is in the hand of the cabinet,” Bassil told As Safir newspaper.