The government is facing protest from its allies against the deal signed with US oil giant ConocoPhillips.
At least three political parties with considerable representation in the Jatiya Sangsad, all of them components of the Awami League-led alliance, have been criticising the deal as it would go against the nation's interests and endanger its energy security.
Jatiya Samajtantrik Dal president and lawmaker Hasanul Haq Inu from a roundtable on energy security of Bangladesh on Monday urged the government to scrap the deal, which has a provision that will encourage ConocoPhillips to export 80 per cent of the gas it will extract from hydrocarbon blocks 10 and 11 in the form of liquefied natural gas.
'Otherwise, the power-starved people of the country will start a massive movement against it,' he warned.
Inu said Bangladesh is suffering from severe energy shortage and it is not acceptable to sign any deal that gives the contractor the scope to export the country's mineral resources.
Pointing at the Niko deal and other one-sided contracts made in the country's energy sector, lawmaker Amena Ahmad termed such contracts 'anti-state'.
In the same roundtable, Bangladesh Workers Party president and lawmaker Rashed Khan Menon said the government would not be allowed to export oil, gas, and other mineral resources from the country.
Menon along with other political leaders in the grand alliance urged the government to enact the Mineral Resources Export Prohibition Act 2010 that has already been placed as a bill in the parliament.
He said the bill which he placed in the parliament last year was nothing but a reflection of Sheikh Hasina's stance in 1998 in response to the suggestion of gas export from the Bibiyana field made on the premise that the country was supposedly floating on oil and gas.
Criticising the contract with the US company, Menon said in the Jatiya Sangsad on Saturday that the present prime minister once had opposed any export of gas and said no gas would be allowed to be exported without keeping an adequate reserve for the country for the next 50 years but now her own government has signed a deal which contains the provision for gas export by a foreign company.
Menon demanded that the government should make the production-sharing contract signed with ConocoPhillips public.
Menon also demanded open discussion in the parliament on the deal and said it is not acceptable that only some government officials and advisers should know the details of the deal while the people, who are the owners of the country's resources, are kept in the dark.
Reminding his fellow MPs that a minister of the BNP-Jamaat-led four-party alliance government was bribed by Canadian company Niko, he said, 'It is not unlikely that such corruption will be unearthed in the future in connection with the ConocoPhillips deal.'
The Workers Party president lambasted a state minister for terming a leader of the oil-gas protection committee a 'foreign agent' and said people know it very well who the real foreign agents are.
'Who are the foreign agents? The people who want to protect our gas or those who are giving away our gas to a foreign company,' he questioned.
State minister for environment and forest Hasan Mahmud digressing from the budget discussion in the Jatiya Sangsad railed against Anu Mohammad, an economist and member secretary of the National Committee to Protect Oil, Gas, Mineral Resources, Power and Port, calling him 'Monu Mohammad'.
The state minister called the national committee a 'foreign agent and spy' which wants to stay in the limelight by making an issue out of the contract signed with ConocoPhillips, which, the committee points out, gives only 20 per cent of the extracted gas to Bangladesh and allows the company to export the rest. This contract, said Anu Muhammad, would benefit only the US company, not the country.
Hasan Mahmud also said in the parliament that a professor of economics has no right to speak on oil and gas as he has no knowledge about mineral resources.
The government on June 16 signed the PSC with ConocoPhillips for oil and gas exploration and extraction in deep sea hydrocarbon blocks 10 and 11 amid protests from experts, civic forums, and political organisations.
Source : New Age
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