A draft report by the US Government Accountability Office reveals between 100,000 and 300,000 barrels of oil from Iraq are unaccounted for and may have been siphoned off through corruption of smuggling. Based on an average of $50 per barrel, the report puts the discrepancy at between $5 million and $15 million daily. The report doesn't provide a final conclusion of what happened to the missing oil, but only offers suggestions including corruption, smuggling, pipeline sabotage, theft and inaccurate reports of production. The GAO tapped experts at the Energy Information Administration within the US Department of Energy for its oil analysis. (NYT [2], May 12)
See our last posts on Iraq [3] and the struggle for Iraq's oil [4].
