Angolan Independents Make One Million

Angola's private indigenous companies (homegrown independents) produced slightly over a million barrels of oil from mainly shallow water fields, in the first quarter of 2013. The companies hold equity in 13 acreages in Angola, of which six are producing, even though marginal.

These six tracts produced a total of 5,861,516 Barrels of Oil in the first three months of 2013. The equity percentages of the Angolan companies in the producing blocks range from 9% to 30%. The companies netted equity production of 1,024,464 Barrels of oil (1.024MMBO), or 17.4% of the total production of these blocks, during the quarter.
That figure comes to 0.065% of Angola’s overall production of 155, 889, 347Barrels for the period. Angola’s daily production itself was 1.732Million Barrels Of Oil Per Day (1.732MMBOPD).
Sociedade Petrolífera Angolana (Somoil) is the most proficient of Angola’s independents. It’s the only one which operates a block. It is also the only private Angolan oil company with an acreage abroad.  It is currently acquiring 3D seismic data on Blocks FS and FST, which it operates.
Duncan Clarke’s Book, Crude Continent: : The Struggle for Africa’s Oil Prize, reports that Falcon Oil(owned by the Volkswagen dealer, Antonio Moquito Mbakassi), won 10% of Block 6 and 5% of Block 15, for which it paid large signature bonus as were levied. Banco Africano de investmentos lent Falcon Oil funds to meet the costs, using the blocks as collaterals.
What’s misleading is not the source of funds, but the subject acreages. The book confuses Block 6 for Block 6/06 and Block 15 for Block 15/06. The company doesn’t have equity in either of Blocks 15 and 17, which are Angola’s largest producers.
Instead, Falcon Oil has 5% equity each in Blocks 15/06, operated by ENI Block 17/06, which is operated by TOTAL and Block 18/06, operated by Petrobras. ENI, TOTAL and Petrobras have made quite a few significant discoveries in Blocks 15/6, 17/06 and 18/06, which will eventually translate to equity production for Falcon, but for now Falcon has no production. Seen from the potentials of these exploratory blocks, which were excised from the producing Blocks 15, 17 and 18 respectively, Falcon is looking to become a sizeable net equity holder of crude.
The much vilified Nazaki Oil, reportedly owned by ranking principals of the Angolan government, holds equity in two deepwater blocks, which are still very much in the exploratory stages. Nazaki holds 30% each in Cobalt operated shallow water block 9/09 and Cobalt operated deepwater block 21/09. Cobalt is an American independent.
ACREP has 20% in 17% in Cabinda North Block, in the onshore Cabinda enclave, in the north of the country. Force Petroleum holds 20% equity in Cabinda South Block in the same area. Neither of these blocks, operated by Sonangol P&P and Pluspetrol respectively, is a producer. But ACREP also has 15% in Block 4/05, which is a marginal producer. Block 4/05 produced 935,875Barrels of oil in the first quarter of 2013.
Somoil is 15% operator of FS and FST, two small producing blocks located onshore Soyo, with partners including Sonangol EP (80%) and Sonangol P&P(5%) in FS and partners Sonangol EP(63.67%), Chevron(16.33%) and Sonangol P&P(5%) in FST. Both FS and FST delivered 172,801Barrels throughout the first three months of 2013, according to Angola’s Ministry of Finance.
Poliedro and Kotoil each holds 9.1% in producing Block 2/85, with Somoil holding 9.3% on the same lease. The entire production for this block in the first quarter of the year was 366,162Barrels.

Sierra Leone’s Health Care System Becomes a Cautionary Tale for Donors

FREETOWN, Sierra Leone — The health statistics in this battered land, still scarred from a decade of civil war, are so alarming that for a decade, donors have opened their wallets to help improve some of the world’s worst rates of maternal and infant mortality. This is the third-most dangerous place on earth to have a baby, and one of the most perilous to be a baby.Millions of donor dollars later, health statistics show that the “crisis” for mothers and babies, as the British government called it, may be lessening. But one crisis appears to have spawned another: In a place where most of the population lives on less than a dollar a day, the incoming rush of health care aid has been dazzling.
Too dazzling, apparently.
Last month, the country’s 29 top health officials found themselves indicted by Sierra Leone’s anticorruption agency on charges of misappropriating a half-million dollars in grants from a global vaccine provider, GAVI Alliance, started by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The amount may not seem huge in some places, but in Sierra Leone, one of the least developed nations in the world, it looms particularly large, and the list of suspects is stunning.
The country’s top doctor — the chief medical officer, Dr. Kizito Daoh — was among those indicted. So were the director of primary health care at the Health Ministry, the permanent secretary at the Health Ministry and the ministry’s program manager for reproductive health. Much of the ministry’s leadership, the key agency in tackling some of the continent’s worst health outcomes, now finds itself charged with wrongdoing, including eight doctors.
“You have a ministry without a head,” said the World Bank representative here, Francis Ato Brown. “It’s virtually decapitated the ministry,” he said of the indictments, adding that they had “the potential to virtually destroy the health care system.”
The officials took money from the vaccine funds to hold workshops and training seminars, for instance — and then could not prove that these sessions had been held, officials say. But that may have been just a piece of the problem. Investigators say they have found evidence of large houses and expensive cars not consistent with official salaries, as well as kickbacks from suppliers.
The vaccine alliance froze about $4.2 million in coming grants in November, as a country that had been a poster child for health care projects — Britain and others have financed a free health care program for mothers and children that has reduced malaria rates — suddenly became a cautionary tale.
Investigators have found nurses illegally selling drugs to patients in the free care program and doctors charging for services that were, according to the donor terms, supposed to be free.
Government auditors have found tens of thousands of dollars withdrawn from an internationally financed maternal and child health program, with no records for how the money was spent; at hospitals in the interior, and at the central medical store in Freetown, they have found no records to support the dispensing of drugs worth thousands of dollars; and they could not find records for 23 of the Health Ministry’s 55 bank accounts. Record-keeping has been “abysmal,” an anticorruption investigator wrote in a report.
The vaccine alliance first noticed problems in an internal review. And last week i t released an audit report that found tens of thousands of dollars in unjustified uses of finances and cash withdrawals, ambulances for which the Health Ministry paid almost twice as much as it should, and over a dozen motorcycles improperly distributed. The audit showed “very high exposure of this grant to misuse,” the report concluded.
But Sierra Leone officials themselves, including the Anti-Corruption Commission and the auditor general, are the ones who are sounding alarms, motivated by the knowledge that outside aid represents 20 percent of national income.
“There is evidence of cash withdrawals, and we haven’t seen what’s been done with the cash,” said Joseph F. Kamara, the head of the Anti-Corruption Commission, whose headquarters are in an old church office building next to the Anglican cathedral downtown. “They were claiming money for supervising work that was never done.”
“We’ve seen a pattern,” the misappropriation of health funds, “clearly being replicated elsewhere,” he said.
Mr. Kamara has 161 people working for him, and they clamber up and down the narrow stairs of the old church building in this sweltering seaside capital. On the worn wooden door of his office is a sticker in the local Krio language exhorting that “corruption must be talked about.”
The charges against the country’s top physicians have also shocked the public in Sierra Leone.
“There’s a perception that doctors are meant to heal wounds, not bleed them,” Mr. Kamara said.
His predecessor obtained a corruption conviction against the former health minister, Sheiku Koroma. Health care “is an area that has long been corrupt,” said Abdul Tejan-Cole, the former anticorruption commissioner, who resigned three years ago after receiving threats.
Top doctors, including at the Health Ministry, “refuse to go to the hospital” because “it’s much more lucrative to manage a donor project,” Mr. Tejan-Cole said. “Across the board in public-sector funds, a lot is going wrong. There’s a lot of misappropriation and abuse.”
Dr. Daoh, the chief medical officer who has been indicted, was sitting on the patio of his two-story house reading the Koran on a recent Saturday afternoon. He complained that the government kept putting off his day in court and said that “nobody has asked my side of the story,” before declining to comment.
The anticorruption chief, Mr. Kamara, boasted about the speed with which he had obtained indictments, but doubts have been raised about whether they will hold up, and whether the volume of indictments was intended primarily to impress donors.
“The indictments were hurriedly done,” said a knowledgeable former top government official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Nonetheless, even the official, who was critical of Mr. Kamara, agreed that a crime had been committed with the missing vaccine funds.
“We can describe this as a reversal of a moral ethos,” Mr. Kamara said. The doctors “should have been there for the victims, but it turns out that they are the perpetrators of the victims’ predicament.”
“It introduces a state of hopelessness in health security,” he added. “You have nowhere to turn to.”