Posted on 03/02/2006 11:29:07 AM PST by soccer_maniac
WASHINGTON - How it happened or who's responsible is a mystery eight years after the fact. But what may have been a simple error or perhaps something more ominous has given a multimillion-dollar windfall to a group of oil and gas companies and could cost the government billions of dollars more in the years to come.
The Interior Department disclosed Wednesday that a provision was mysteriously deleted from hundreds of federal drilling leases in the late 1990s that would have required producers to pay royalties, once prices reached a certain level, on oil or gas taken from deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
If the Con-gress wants to get its collective shorts in knot over something, I think this bloody well deserves it.
Exactly. Some TAX goes uncollected because they goofed, and it is not being sucked out of the economy and wasted on government. What's not to like?
World Net Daily 7/21/98 Charles Smith ".In response to the House request for Sockowitz documents on 1995 memos between himself and Baca - on July 6, 1998, Reinsch wrote a confused reply to Chairman Floyd Spence of the House National Security Committee. Curiously, Reinsch ignores the Kazakhstan request of 1996 and claims in his letter that the memos he exchanged with Ms. Baca were not for the Chinese Loral satellite launch that failed in February, 1996."
Or is this a different Ms. Baca?
An terrific site you have there, BTW, A-G. An incredible amount of info. And it must involve an awful lot of work. Thanks!
The answer is NO.......the REAL question is WHY NOT?
The Baca in that excerpt is Bettie Baca. (Sockowitz 1995 correspondence). Thanks for asking!
Never seems to end ... Thanks for the ping!
they don't have any.....I am losing any hope that ANYBODY gives a damn about we simple citizens out here......
to clarify....its the Dummies who want to go after the terrible profits of the oil and gas companies that are making billions......how can the Dummies go after them with a straight face KNOWING that it was their own guy ,the TOON, who's administration allowed this tiny little billion dollar "mistake" to occur...
oh...I forgot....we're talking Dummies here....they have no scruples nor shame in defending their own ........
plenty. I rember this one. it did drop out of the public mind rather quickly. but then Clinton had MSM eating out of his hand all the time
We talked about this, on FR, back then.
If WE knew, how come it's a surprise, all of a sudden?
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BIG BUMP
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It would not surprise me if the flunkies in Interior either screwed the pooch or there was a transfer of funds somewhere. Either way, this should be investigated.
Keep in mind the price of oil in 98-99 was in the crapper. Sweet crude here (Williston Basin) was selling for $6.50 a bbl. Anyone expected to even look twice at (very expensive, cutting edge offshore technology) drilling and exploration operations in the deepwater G.O.M. had to have some incentives, especially then.
After all, the IEA had reported an imminent worldwide glut of oil (they failed to take into account growth in Asian demand), and that report crashed the price.
How often do the leases not held by production come up for renewal?
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