OilMin biased, inefficient: ADAG

Continuing its attack on the Union petroleum ministry, the Anil Ambani group today said the ministry had failed to attract top global players for oil and gas production due to “lack of sanctity attached to concluded contracts” and “partisanship in favour of domestic players”.

Since August 17, the group has also been placing ads in the national media, questioning the revision in the capex plan of rival RIL’s D6 block, which, it claims, will help RIL in making “super-normal profit of nearly Rs 50,000 crore, while the government gets only Rs 500 crore”.

“Not even one of the top five international oil majors participated in National Exploration and Licensing Policy (NELP) rounds (bids) in the past three years... top private foreign players such as Exxon, Shell, Chevron, Statoil, Conoco Phillips have never participated in a single NELP round,” Reliance Power CEO J P Chalasani said in a statement. Stating that NELP rounds over the past three years revealed the absolute failure of the ministry to attract any global capital flows, he said this was also due to “clear and visible partisanship in favour of domestic players like RIL.”

Another Anil Ambani group firm, Reliance Natural Resources Ltd (RNRL), is engaged in a legal battle with Mukesh Ambani-led RIL over supply of gas at a committed price. The next hearing of the case at the Supreme Court is scheduled for September 1. Criticising the upstream regulator, the Director General of Hydrocarbons, for alleging that the ongoing RIL-RNRL battle would have a negative impact on global investment flow in India’s oil and gas sector, Chalasani said the failure was due to the absence of a well-defined, transparent and consistent policy regime of the petroleum ministry.