DUBAI, March 14, 2018
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) denied granting any concession to Qatar over the operation of a shared offshore oil field, local media reported Tuesday.
Media reports said Qatar Petroleum signed a deal with Abu Dhabi to operate the Bunduq oil field that is shared between the two nations.
An official source from the UAE Supreme Petroleum Council was quoted by the state news agency WAM as saying that the Bunduq field, due to its geographical location, is shared between the Emirate of Abu Dhabi and Qatar.
“It has been operated via a concession with a Japanese consortium for over four decades. This concession was recently extended by each government respectively to the Japanese consortium with no direct communication between the two states,” said the source.
“There is no commercial or trading relations established between the UAE and Qatar in the extension of this concession,” the source added.
Abu Dhabi is the capital of the UAE and home to approximately 7 percent of the world’s known oil reserves.
The UAE, together with Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Egypt, has severed diplomatic ties with Qatar since last June and imposed a political and economic boycott on the tiny oil-rich Gulf nation, citing Doha’s interference in their internal affairs and supporting terrorism.
Qatar has strongly denied the charges, while rejecting a list of tough demands put forward by the quartet as conditions for restoring ties.
The demands included Qatar’s stopping the alleged funding of terrorism, shutting down Qatari state-owned TV channel Al Jazeera, and downgrading its relations with Iran.
