Mohamed Al-Ansari, from the NOC’s media office, today told the Libya Herald that Deputy Oil Minister Omar Shakmak had denied that Zeidan said the headquarters would move to Benghazi. He said that what was meant was that a representative office of NOC would be opened there. However yesterday, Shakmak was quoted by Reuters saying very definitively that “the headquarters will be in Benghazi,” providing that a restructuring plan was approved by Congress.

For her part, Congresswoman Fawzia Karwan, a member of the Energy Committee, says there is a plan to create a new organisation which she called the Libyan Corporation for Manufacturing and Exploration. It would be based in Benghazi. A branch of the new corporation would be set up in Tripoli, she told the Libya Herald, just as the NOC would have a representative office in Benghazi. The aim is to decentralise.

This is a significant change from the earlier plan to have exploration andproduction based in Tripoli. It appears now that only production will be left to the NOC in the capital although separating production from exploration and linking it to manufacturing appears to make little administrative sense. Karwan added that the Committee had met with the Oil Minister Abdulbari Al-Arusi as well as Benghazi Congress members to discuss the issue and that it was pointed out that a transfer of the NOC as a whole would involve a major financial loss for the ministry. “Benghazi will not get any benefit from transferring the NOC there”, she added, “because employees from the western region will follow the corporation and there will be no opportunity to appoint employees from Benghazi and the eastern part of Libya”.

However, it would be different with the Libyan Corporation for Manufacturing and Exploration. It would be independent of the NOC. It would aid Benghazi’s economic recovery, she said, because all production and exploration companies would also move to Benghazi.

(Source: Libya Herald)