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South Sudan accuses Khartoum of ‘diverting oil’

By MACHEL AMOS in JubaPosted Tuesday, January 10 2012 at 16:58

South Sudan on Tuesday accused Sudan of confiscating its oil entitlements for last December and setting up secret pipelines to tap the oil from the fields inside her territory.

The Petroleum and Mining minister Stephen Dhieu said Khartoum “ordered the foreign oil companies to divert all of South Sudan’s Nile Blend crude oil entitlements for December to Khartoum and El-Obeid refineries,” without a consent from Juba.

Dhieu said the authorities in Khartoum ordered “550,000 barrels of South Sudan’s Dar Blend crude oil entitlement for December to be delivered to a Sudan buyer.”

He said Khartoum has also “started the construction of a new tie-in pipeline between the Petrodar pipeline and the Khartoum refinery designed to permanently divert 13 per cent of Dar Blend” extracted from South Sudan’s Unity state.

In the same statement, Dhieu said that Khartoum has “prevented two ships from leaving the port carrying 1.6 million barrels of Dar blend originating from South Sudan and preventing one additional vessel to load 0.6 million barrels of South Sudan Dar Blend.”

The development is a fresh twist that could undermine the already strained relations between the two countries.

Two other ships, according to Dhieu, were prevented last Tuesday from entering the Port of Sudan to take possession of 1.2 million barrels of Nile Blend purchased from South Sudan to the buyers.

Pipeline operators

South Sudan relies heavily on oil, constituting 98 per cent of its budget, and any interruption on the production and sale of oil would hurt the infant country’s fledgling economy.