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Piracy is common off Nigeria and often linked to militants Pirates have seized a ship owned by a French company off the Nigerian coast, taking nine crew members hostage. The company - Bourbon - said the captain had assured them that all crew members were unharmed. Bourbon - which provides specialist boats for the oil and gas industry - said it was working to free the crew. The hostages are from Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon and Indonesia. Piracy is common in Nigerian waters, often linked to militants targeting oil companies. Militants attack vessels and strip them of valuables, taking hostages for...

BAGHDAD - A parliamentary committee is working on a pair of oil-related draft bills, one to re-establish the state-run oil company and another to fight oil smuggling, a senior lawmaker said Saturday. Abdul-Hadi al-Hassani, deputy chairman of the committee on oil, gas and natural resources, said legislation to re-establish the Iraqi National Oil Co., was likely to be presented to parliament on Tuesday. The measure is part of a package which also includes legislation to regulate the country's oil sector, reorganize the Oil Ministry and distribute revenues among Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish regions. Al-Hassani said he was uncertain when the...

WASHINGTON and TORONTO — Canadian Maurice Strong agreed to step aside Wednesday as a special envoy for the United Nations, but vowed to clear his name after being linked to Tongsun Park, a Korean lobbyist charged in connection with the Iraq oil-for-food scandal. At the same time, new details emerged about a Calgary oil company in which Mr. Strong and his son, Fred, were major investors during the 1990s together with Mr. Park -- whom the younger Mr. Strong described as "a spooky guy." Shareholders in Cordex Petroleums Inc. also included CSL Group Inc., the holding company owned by Prime...

UNITED NATIONS (AP) - Iraq called Friday for a widening of the investigation of the U.N. oil-for-food program and demanded the immediate return of money in the U.N. account that paid for administration of the humanitarian relief effort. Iraq's U.N. Ambassador Samir Sumaidaie also reiterated the government's demand that the United Nations stop using oil-for-food money to pay for the independent investigation into the program led by former U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker. "It is outrageous that Iraqi funds were mismanaged and then we have to pay for finding out about the mismanagement," he told a news conference a...

Since midsummer, the Senate Intelligence Committee has been attempting to solve the biggest mystery of the Iraq war: the disparity between the Bush Administration’s prewar assessment of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and what has actually been discovered. The committee is concentrating on the last ten years’ worth of reports by the C.I.A. Preliminary findings, one intelligence official told me, are disquieting. “The intelligence community made all kinds of errors and handled things sloppily,” he said. The problems range from a lack of quality control to different agencies’ reporting contradictory assessments at the same time. One finding, the official went...

To look at the soft-focus propaganda pictures of Venezuela's Castroite Chavez government, you'd think Venezuela's state oil company was not about producing oil, but rather rehabilitating life's down-and-outers. The Venezuela Information Office's Web site shows smiling, supposedly contented beneficiaries of the bountiful, beneficent state oil company, which is somehow turning singers into systems engineers, and you're supposed to feel good. But that's not what's going on for workers inside the huge Venezuelan state oil company. The remnants of the once-mighty PdVSA are battling the Chavez government in a contract dispute over three miserable dollars a day in wages. Inflation from...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Back when federal lawmakers legally could be paid for speaking to outside groups, John Kerry collected more than $120,000 in fees from interests as diverse as big oil, tobacco, the liquor lobby and unions, records show. Between 1985 and 1990, Kerry's first five years in the Senate from Massachusetts, he pocketed annual amounts slightly under the limits for speaking fees set by Congress. Unlike many colleagues, he donated a speaking fee to charity only once, according to annual financial disclosure reports reviewed by The Associated Press. One of the companies to pay Kerry $1,000 for a speech...

Politics first: the Kremlin tightens its control By Carola Hoyos and Arkady Ostrovsky Published: August 5 2004 04:00 | Last updated: August 5 2004 04:00 On July 22, the day that Yukos, the oil company, warned of its imminent bankruptcy and its main production subsidiary was seized by bailiffs, Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, held a meeting with James Mulva, the chief executive of ConocoPhillips, and Vagit Alekperov, the Soviet-era oil boss who now heads Lukoil, Russia's flagship oil company. The president had some good news for Mr Mulva: the government had just signed a decree to sell its 7.6...

<p>PARIS (Reuters) - French oil company TotalFinaElf does not expect to be frozen out of oil contracts in Iraq despite France's tough opposition to the U.S.-led war, the firm's chief of exploration and production said Tuesday.</p> <p>In an interview with the newspaper Le Figaro, Christophe de Margerie dismissed rumors Total was on a "black list" of firms that will be denied lucrative contracts in post-war Iraq, although he stressed the firm remains vigilant.</p>