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(TEHERAN) Iran has signed gas deals worth US$14 billion with Malaysia, state television reported yesterday, the latest Asian investment in the Islamic Republic where Western firms have become increasingly cautious about their investments.
The deals involved a project to produce liquefied natural gas (LNG) and the development of two gas fields, the report said, without making clear if they were all new or related to contracts sealed late last year.
The Isna news agency said that they were signed on Monday with Malaysia's SKS group, which in December last year struck a multibillion-dollar gas development contract with Iran, which boasts the world's second-largest gas reserves after Russia. The National Iranian Oil Company and SKS, which is linked to tycoon Syed Mokhtar Al-Bukhary, reached a preliminary US$16 billion deal in January 2007 to develop the southern Golshan and Ferdows gas fields and build plants to produce LNG.
But a spokeswoman for the National Iranian Gas Exporting Company said that those contracts concerned upstream development of the fields, while the ones signed on Monday concerned 'midstream' development and an LNG plant. 'Three documents pertaining to the Golshan and Ferdows fields' midstream development were signed last night,' she told Reuters.
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Iran Oil Minister Gholamhossein Nozari said that exports of crude and 120,000 barrels of gas condensates were part of the agreements signed on Monday. 'The development of Golshan and Ferdows gas fields will be based on a buy-back contract, and (it was) also agreed for Malaysia to invest in and build an LNG plant,' Isna quoted him as saying. -- Reuters
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