05-08-09 Ecuador's ministry of oil and mines, under orders from President Rafael Correa, established an internal committee to revise OCP Ecuador's contract to operate the 500-km Oleducto de Crudos Pesados (OCP) oil pipeline.
Minister Germanico Pinto, taking his cue from remarks in July by Correa, said the committee will have 45 days to analyze the legal, economic, technical, and other aspects of the contract.

"We're going to tell these people that they are stealing from the Ecuadorean state -- we're going to renegotiate the OCP contract," Correa said in mid-July. "They've evaded hundreds of millions of dollars worth of taxes-we're no longer going to allow that," he added.
In particular, Correa said Ecuador would insist on renegotiating the contract because the line's owners reported fictitious loans with high interest rates, withheld the real cost of shipped crude oil and inflated the price of the pipeline's construction.

The $ 1.4 bn OCP line, which began operations in 2003, transports crude from fields in Amazonia to the OCP maritime terminal in Esmeraldas province. In March, reports said the line was carrying an average of 200,000 bpd of crude oil, less than half its normal load of 450,000 bpd.
In February, the line was shut down after damage caused a spill of 14,000 bbl of crude in the north-eastern province of Napo. The company said the damage had been caused by natural phenomena.

The OCP's shareholders are Occidental Petroleum, Repsol-YPF, Petroleo Brasileiro, Perenco, ENI, and Andes Petroleum, a joint venture of China National Petroleum Corp. and Sinopec Overseas Oil and Gas.