BAKU: Despite huge oil assets laying at its doorstep, beneath the Caspian Sea, the Caucasus republic of Azerbaijan is still counting on a second oil boom to haul it out of poverty.

Some 150 years after the first oil rush gave the Nobel brothers the bulk of their fortune and filled the coffers of the Rothschild family, the country’s eight million inhabitants pray this boom in the making will ease their plight — and not merely bring more fabulous payoffs for their rulers and their cronies, and foreign partners.

The glimmer of hope came in September at the Sangachal oil terminal, 40 kilometres south of the capital Baku.

Here their president, Heidar Aliyev, Georgia’s Edward Shevardnadze and Turkish head of state Ahmet Necdet Sezer launched construction of a 1760 kms pipeline from Baku via Tbilisi to the Mediterranean port of Ceyhan (BTC line).

The BTC project will cost around three billion dollars, but is expected to pipe 50 million tons of oil a year after it starts operating in early 2005.

The reserves supplying it are staggering in size, anything up to 25 billion tons of oil that are mainly earmarked for the western market.

“When the first oil flows through the BTC that will be a new start for Azerbaijan’s independence (from the Soviet Union in 1991),” Economics Minister Farhad Aliyev said.

Most crucially, the BTC will bypass the existing, tariff-heavy, transport routes through Russia — a reality that Baku imbues with huge economic and political importance.

“With this money we can start to build up the country’s infrastructure, agriculture and other sectors,” says Aliyev.

The expected participation of a total of 400 foreign companies in the pipeline project will also bring badly needed employment to republic.

But as in the oil-rich United Arab Emirates, most Azeris need not expect any real signs of personal wealth soon, even if the minister stresses without elaboration that “Our situation is quite different” from that of the UAE.

Without naming names, western diplomats in Baku say most proceeds from the oil are cosily split among members of “a small group”. Other local observers of the country’s business customs are more scathing.—dpa