Word: libyans
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...auditorium of Tripoli's Corinthia Hotel, a number of Libyan officials sit onstage in dark suits and ties, addressing scores of Western executives in flawless English about the country's new business opportunities. A few feet away is a huge portrait of the most famous face in Libya, Muammar Gaddafi, in his trademark African robe and sunglasses, fist in the air, a defiant look on his face, as if to say to the roomful of businessmen: I still run things around here. But the businessmen don't seem to notice. Instead they are transfixed by a tall young man with...
...Corinthia - Libya's only luxury hotel, boasting $300-a-night rooms - Western executives crowd the lobby. American executives will need to catch up with European oil businesses, which remained in Libya through decades of U.S. sanctions. Italy's Eni, Spain's Repsol-YPF and France's Total have run Libyan subsidiaries with no American competition. Virtually all of Libya's oil - about 1.5 million barrels a day - is exported to Europe, and since October, millions of cubic meters of gas have flowed directly from Libya to Sicily through Eni and Libya's National Oil Corp's new pipeline...
...lobby, rubbing shoulders with politicians and diplomats. The U.S. liaison office, the prelude to a real embassy, now operates out of bedrooms on an upper floor of the Corinthia. Two sparsely furnished suites serve as the temporary digs for Marathon Oil and ConocoPhillips, both of which suspended their large Libyan oil operations when U.S. sanctions were imposed in 1986. "Nobody really hates Americans here," says Abdullah Salim el-Badri, chairman of the country's National Oil Corp., which runs the huge oil fields abandoned by the Americans in 1986. "Oil started here with the Americans. They trained...
...Libyans' friendliness to Americans is even clearer hundreds of miles down the coast at the Essider Marine Terminal, from which oil is shipped by the government-owned Waha Oil Co. The company took over the operation from U.S. companies in 1986, when sanctions drove out the Oasis Group, a combination of Amerada Hess, Marathon Oil and Conoco. But a handful of American citizens are still at work in the facility and have been throughout the decades of sanctions, in violation of U.S. laws. "Basically, we never left," says Conrad B. Cazalas, 58, an electrician from Corpus Christi, Texas, sitting...
...American oil executives have flown regularly to the Essider terminal and to Waha's desert oil fields, trying to discern how to re-enter Libya. Under a 1986 standstill agreement, the fields are still partly the property of the American oil companies, though they have been operated by the Libyan government. Diplomats in Tripoli and Waha workers say negotiations have bogged down, with the American oil companies demanding a controlling stake in the operations, in return for investing billions. That prospect is met in the oil fields with a mixed response. "Before 1986 the Americans were the bosses, and everyone...