International oil firms working in Kurdistan could face canceled contracts after the Supreme Court of Iraq made two legal rulings on oil sales and contracts. The recent rulings hark back to a deal struck between Kurdistan and Iraq in 2014 when the two sides agreed to swap oil for a portion of the national budget. The move by Iraq to reconsider oil and gas contracts in Kurdistan may have been driven by its desire to counter the growing influence of Russia in the region. The Supreme Court of the Federal Government of Iraq (FGI) in Baghdad has made two landmark legal rulings that have significant, if not catastrophic, implications for the exploration, development, and extraction operations of international oil companies (IOCs) working in the northern Iraq semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan. First, it ruled last week that sales of oil and gas by the region’s government, the KRG, independent of […]