The new authorities have taken a further step in their announced desire to renegotiate oil, gas and mining contracts so that they benefit the population more, with the establishment of a commission of experts, indicated Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko.
The country became an oil producer in June and is due to start exploiting its natural gas in the second quarter of 2024. Ranked among the 25 least developed states in the world, it is banking on these resources to make an economic leap. But the new authorities have promised to renegotiate the contracts signed under the previous government because they consider them unfavourable.
The commission, made up of senior officials from the Senegalese administration, experts in the oil, mining, tax and economic fields, was launched on Monday in the presence of the head of government, RTS said in a report on Monday evening.
It “stems from the desire to respect a commitment. We had to regret and vigorously denounce the way in which the agreements and conventions were concluded, most of the time to the detriment of the strategic interests of Senegal and its people,” Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko declared on RTS.
“We made a firm commitment to revisit these various agreements, to reexamine them and to work to rebalance them in the national interest,” he said.
“The logic is to work in a scientific, rigorous, methodical manner on all aspects (of) these conventions. The first exercise (will be) to review these conventions in light of the different legal bases on which they are based,” he added.
In June, Senegal began oil production in the Sangomar field (central-west), where the Australian group Woodside Energy operates.
The start of natural gas exploitation is expected in the second quarter of 2024 for the Grand tortue/Ahmeyim (GTA) deposit, on the border with Mauritania, developed by the British BP with the American Kosmos Energy, the Mauritanian Hydrocarbons Company (SMH) and the national public company Petrosen.
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