Israel meets three-quarters of oil demand from KRG via Turkey: Report

LONDON

REUTERS photo

Israel has reportedly purchased as much as 77 percent of its oil supplies from the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in northern Iraq, providing them with an essential source of funding in their campaign against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), a new report in the Financial Times revealed on Aug. 24.

“We do not care where the oil goes once we have delivered it to the traders,” a senior Kurdish government adviser in Arbil said, as quoted by the Financial Times. 

“Our priority is getting the cash to fund our Peshmerga forces against Daesh [ISIL] and to pay civil servant salaries,” added the adviser. 

Israeli refineries and oil companies imported more than 19 million barrels of Kurdish oil between the beginning of May and Aug. 11, according to shipping data, trading sources and satellite tanker tracking, said the report. 

This would be worth almost $1 billion based on international prices over the period, it added. 

“That is the equivalent of about 77 percent of average Israeli demand, which runs at roughly 240,000 barrels per day. More than one-third of all of the northern Iraqi exports, which are shipped from Turkey’s Mediterranean port of Ceyhan, went to Israel over the period,” said the report. 

According to the report, Italy and France were also emerging as big buyers. 

“It is a trade conducted through secretive pre-pay deals brokered by some of the world’s largest oil trading companies, including Vitol and Trafigura,” claimed the report. 

Israel’s government does not comment on the source of energy supplies, which it views as a matter of national security, according to the report. Insiders told the Financial Times it continues to import oil from Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Russia, its main suppliers for much of the past decade.