The accusations brought against Sterling Resources are false, the Canadian company has all the authorizations needed and the Romanian state has practically cancelled its own right to benefit from a share of the oil production from Black Sea reserves, following the Oil Law, the company’s vice president Stephen Birrell said yesterday. Birrell was heard by the Chamber of Deputies’ Industry and Service Committee in relation to the oil contract signed by the Canadian company and the Romanian state. “Sterling was never officially notified of violating the law. All the accusations are completely false. We were accused of having changed the provisions of the contract, from exploitation and sharing of production into exploitation and the payment of some royalties. We have had the right to extract from these reserves from the beginning, following the initial contract signed in 1992. We were also accused that through an additional document in 2007, we made the state lose its right to participate in the sharing of production, but the state actually cancelled this right by itself. It wasn’t Sterling that introduced royalties instead of production sharing, through the Oil Law,” Birrell said, quoted by Mediafax. The head of the Romanian Agency for Mineral Reserves (ANRM), Gelu Maracineanu, accused Sterling of never having made proof of its financial and technical capacity for oil extraction operations in the Black Sea and of not having all the necessary authorizations to conduct oil operations in Romania.
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