Oil And Gas Law In Kazakhstan

Central Asia has emerged as potentially the most important new hydrocarbon province in decades. Among the countries whose natural resources are now the focus of world attention, Kazakhstan is very much in the front rank. The scale and strategic importance of its reserves mean that it is set to become one of the key players in the global market. Realising that potential depends on many factors, not least its legal treatment of the oil and gas industry. The contributors to this volume consider the various dimensions of that legal treatment, including investment and contractual issues, dispute settlement, transport and refining, environmental issues, and taxation. The importance of the international context for Kazakhstan's domestic law is a key feature of this book, as is a concern with identifying existing problems and suggesting the most fruitful direction for reform. The book will be of interest to practitioners and academics working in the specific field as well as in the more general area of legal relations between the oil and gas industry and transition economies. Ilias Bantekas is Reader in Law at the University of Westminster, London, UK. He has written widely in the field of international law and won the International Committee of the Red Cross Paul Reuter prize in 2000. Visiting Fellow at Harvard Law School (2003-04). John Paterson is Reader in Law at the University of Westminster, London, UK. He has written on the regulation of the oil and gas industry and acts as a consultant to the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency. Maidan Suleimenov is Professor of Law at the Kazakh State Academy of Law and Adilet Higher Law School, Almaty, Kazakhstan. He was directly involved in Kazakhstan's accession to the Energy Charter Treaty and has also been responsible for legislative drafting in the field.

Because agreements concerning oil and gas upstream activities have historically been developed in common law jurisdictions, a growing concern for the petroleum industry is that a some upstream investment might not be enforceable in a civil law jurisdiction to the extent the same standards/concepts are used without any adaptation. This is why it is essential to understand and analyse how to implement a Joint Operating Agreement in civil law countries. This new edition of this unique in-depth treatment of JOAs under civil law offers a new abundance of practical considerations addressing enforceability issues in a wide variety of civil law jurisdictions likely to be conducting joint operations among two or more parties. The country-by-country analysis helps greatly in ensuring that such issues and topics as the following will be covered in a contract subject to civil law: obligations and liabilities; relationship of the parties; exclusive operations; force majeure; hardship; and host granting instrument. A useful appendix to this new edition is dedicated to a wealth of short practical comments and specific guidance. The first edition of this book presented the first JOA edited book to address the essential requirements from a large variety of civil law perspectives. This new edition offers a broader and more complete discussion of the latest legal developments with respect to the legal framework and principles underpinning JOAs in more civil law countries. It analyses the main issues that the petroleum industry and its investors might face in civil law jurisdictions with actual or potential large oil and gas reserves, and as such it is a unique and immensely valuable source of information and guidance for oil and gas law practitioners, legal counsel, and business and commercial negotiators involved in transnational operating agreements around the world.

This book is the first-ever comprehensive overview of the legal system of Kazakhstan in English. It offers a compact, coherent, systematic and reliable overview of the major legal concepts, principles and developments of the legal system of Kazakhstan. Sixteen chapters, each written by an expert in the respective field, cover the following specific areas of the Kazakhstani legal system: History of Kazakhstan; Basic Features of the Legal System (Comparative Perspective and Sources of Law); Legal Education and Science in Kazakhstan; Constitutional Law; Administrative Law; Law of Persons; Property Law; Law of Obligations; Family and Inheritance Law; Labor Law; Private International Law; Civil Procedure; Criminal Law; Criminal Procedure; Investment and Energy Law; Tax Law.

Drawing on international, transnational, and comparative legal scholarship, The Law and Policy of New Eurasian Regionalization: Economic Integration, Trade, and Investment in the Post-Soviet and Greater Eurasian Space, additionally offers the insights of a plethora of leading international scholars in economics, institutional theory, area studies, international relations, global political economy, political science, and sociology. The contributors come from four corners of the globe, including Asia, Europe, and North America.

This makes the Caspian region one of the most important geo-political areas in the post-Cold War era." "This introductory book is written to meet the needs of undergraduate students interested in post-Soviet politics in Central Asia and Caucasus and is suitable for the general public interested in the contemporary politics of this area."--Jacket.

"This report analyzes the tactics employed by Kazakh authorities and three companies operating in the oil and gas sector in western Kazakhstan to restrict workers' rights to freedom of assembly, association, and expression leading up to and during peaceful labor strikes that began in May 2011. Local authorities broke the strike at one of the companies in June. Workers at the other two continued peaceful strikes until December 16, 2011, when clashes erupted between police and others, including striking oil workers, in Zhanaozen, a town in remote western Kazakhstan. Police shot 12 people dead in the clashes"--Publisher's website.

In Kazakhstan, the oil industry plays a crucial role in its economic and political life due to the country’s considerable oil revenues and accompanying conflicting interests. As an arena of political struggle, this industry provides a good test case for uncovering regime maintenance techniques. This book examines the ways in which the post-Soviet Kazakh regime has managed to sustain itself in power, and the regime maintenance techniques it has used in the process of establishing and upholding its position. It scrutinizes the tools that the Kazakh regime employed in order to bring the country’s oil industry under its control and, while doing so, shifts the emphasis from the prevalent zhuz-horde, tribe, and clan-based approaches to Kazakh politics towards corporatism and patron-client mechanisms of control. Based on extensive field work in Kazakhstan and in-depth interviews with high ranking representatives of companies working in Kazakhstan’s oil and gas industry, both local and foreign, the National Oil Company and its subsidiaries, government agencies, foreign diplomats, journalists and representatives of oppositional parties and NGOs, this book provides a comprehensive study of the issues of politics of oil and state-business relationships in Kazakhstan.

This book makes two central claims: first, that mineral-rich states are cursed not by their wealth but, rather, by the ownership structure they choose to manage their mineral wealth and second, that weak institutions are not inevitable in mineral-rich states. Each represents a significant departure from the conventional resource curse literature, which has treated ownership structure as a constant across time and space and has presumed that mineral-rich countries are incapable of either building or sustaining strong institutions - particularly fiscal regimes. The experience of the five petroleum-rich Soviet successor states (Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, the Russian Federation, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan) provides a clear challenge to both of these assumptions. Their respective developmental trajectories since independence demonstrate not only that ownership structure can vary even across countries that share the same institutional legacy but also that this variation helps to explain the divergence in their subsequent fiscal regimes.