Ghana's Natural Resources To Be Mapped For Auction - Murtala Mohammed

The President, John Dramani Mahama has tasked the Ministry of Energy and Petroleum, Lands and natural resources to carry out a comprehensive Natural resource mapping of the country. This measure is to enable government employ an auctioning method for the allocating of mineral exploration and development right to the respective companies. Briefing the press on this new development, the Deputy Minister of information and Media relations, Hon. Mohammed Murtala noted that, this approach will introduce fairness and ensure that, the country is able to derive maximum revenue from its natural resources endowment. �The approach apart from being fairer enables the country to derive maximum revenue from its natural resource endowment� he noted According to him �if you look at previous explorations, you have a company that will come and say that, we want to explore but before that, we want an agreement with you- once we identify that we have identified that there is oil here and this quantity, government will then be able to bring in companies and then tell them that these are the conditions and then auction it to the highest bidder- we stand to benefit a lot from this.� Meanwhile, cabinet has approved an application by Coal Natural Resources Limited and Development Limited for the east cape 3 points block and thus, it will be submitted to parliament for approval, per the agreement reached, Coal Natural resources will hold 60% Development Limited, 40%, their shares will be approximately reduced to accommodate GMPC�s 10% carried interest and 17% optional additional paid interest