March 29, 2003	Saturday	Muharram 25, 1424

MOSCOW: Russia can forget about its oil interests in Iraq, as Washington and London will cut Moscow out of any postwar carve-up of the world’s second largest crude reserves, a Russian oil chief said on Friday.

“We’re clearly going to have to cut our losses on anything we have there and anything we could have had,” the head of Russian state-run oil firm Zarubezhneft, Nikolai Tokarev, told the daily Vremya Novostei.

“The Americans haven’t gone into this war intending to share with anyone. It’s a war trophy,” he said.

Analyst Sergei Rogov of the USA-Canada Institute agreed that there was “no point in rushing to try and get a share of post-war Iraq’s oil wealth: we won’t get even a breadcrumb.”

Moreover, “as far as oil contracts as concerned, Russian firms don’t have the capital or technology needed to develop Iraqi oilfields, they would have needed Western firms in any case,” he told reporters.

Russia’s top oil company LUKoil, which saw a lucrative contract with Baghdad cancelled last December following reports that the oil firm was in contact with exiled opposition groups, is unlikely to receive any favourable treatment, Mr Tokarev said.

“No one is going to ask them (the Iraqi opposition) who is going to work there. There will be a puppet government, and the United States and Britain will themselves carve up the cake,” he said.—AFP