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US judge lifts order on Kurdish crude

Press TV – August 26, 2014

A US court has scrapped an order to seize one million barrels of oil, disputed between the Iraqi government and the autonomous Kurdistan region.

“Kurdistan’s unauthorized export of oil over land -– and later overseas –- may violate Iraqi law, but it does not violate US maritime law,” US District Judge Gray Miller said on Monday.

A tanker carrying crude oil from Iraq’s Kurdistan region has been waiting in international waters off the coast of Texas for a month now.

The ruling follows a long-running dispute between Erbil and Baghdad over the ownership of the cargo. With the new ruling, the Kurdish government will be able to sell $100 million worth of crude oil.

Judge Miller said “he lacked authority under federal laws governing property stolen at sea to decide the dispute.”

Miller threw out a seizure order issued July 28 by a Houston magistrate judge, who questioned US jurisdiction in the matter while agreeing to store the cargo onshore at Iraq’s expense as the debate continued in that nation’s Supreme Court.

Iraq had failed to convince the district judge that “the oil was misappropriated when it was loaded into a tanker in the Mediterranean Sea after being pumped across Turkey in an Iraq-owned pipeline.”

August 26, 2014 - Posted by | Economics | ,

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