Mustafa Sanallah, chairman of the Libyan national oil company (NOC) refused to leave his seat after Prime Minister Abdelhamid Dbeibah’s decision to dismiss him on Wednesday (July 13th). Dbeibah appointed a new boss, Farhat Bengdara, a financier close to the United Arab Emirates who had worked with Gaddafi. The head of government has also appointed a new board of directors.
In a recorded video, Mustafa Sanallah, the demise chief of the oil company, speaks directly to the head of government: this institution belongs to all Libyans and not to the Dbeibah family “, he launched.
Mustafa Sanallah, in office since 2014, has no intention of letting it go and he has led several attacks on social networks against the Prime Minister. He accuses him of wanting to take advantage of his position to sign contracts with the NOC in his own interest. Sanallah says he opposed it. He openly questions Dbeibah on a sum of 165 billion dinars allocated by the NOC to the Prime Minister who would have distributed it to his relatives.
And the head of the NOC empties his bag and accuses Dbeibah of wanting to promote contracts with the NOC on behalf of the United Arab Emirates, solely in order to maintain power.
Yesterday militias loyal to Dbeibah entered the NOC building to install the new president and his board of directors. These clashes injured some of the employees.
The tension around the control of the national oil company could lead to clashes between militias opposed to Tripoli.
Previously, the Noc had a purely technical and administrative role. She had no financial role. The billions of dollars in oil revenues were immediately transferred to the central bank in Tripoli. But in September 2020, due to the blocking of the oil terminals, and under direct pressure from Washington, the Noc had to manage this money itself. This change in the way of managing these revenues gave the Noc a political role. For Jalel Harchaoui, researcher at the Global Initiative, by appointing a financier to head this important institution, Dbeibah is seeking to control oil revenues.
He will have a privileged, direct right of inspection in the distribution of money. He [Dbeibah, NDLR] is not interested in oil, engineering, maintenance or extraction issues, it is interested in money. And in addition, he would have pleased a very important state, the United Arab Emirates. Third, in the same process, he hopes to be able to separate Haftar from [Fathi] Bashagha: to please, appease Haftar, by rendering Bashgha irrelevant to marginalize him while sending appeasement signals to Haftar.