Kurdistan takes stake in foreign-based oil joint venture

The government of Iraqi Kurdistan will take an equity stake in an energy company to be formed by combining Canada’s Heritage Oil and Turkey’s Genel Enerji, which both operate in the semiautonomous Kurdish region.

Genel produces and exports oil from Kurdistan’s Taq Taq and Tawke oilfields, while Heritage recently announced it had found a new Kurdish oilfield that may contain up to three billion barrels of recoverable crude.

The deal would leave Cukorova Group, a privately held Turkish conglomerate that holds most of Genel’s shares, in control of HeritaGE, the merged oil enterprise. The Kurdish government would get a 16.8 per cent stake in the proposed company.“The KRG has confirmed that it intends to be a long-term shareholder and is therefore willing to enter into a lock-up agreement in respect of the Heritage shares it will receive, but with the ability to sell shares periodically to fund new infrastructure and local community support projects,” Heritage said in a statement.

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• Kurdistan to own 17pc of enlarged Heritage Oil group (telegraph.co.uk)