Government organises workshop on oil exploration

Accra, Aug. 19, GNA - The government on Tuesday organised a workshop to allow in-depth discussions on taxation and fiscal arrangements concerning oil exploration to quicken the country's entry into a middle-income status.

The workshop, among other things, discussed how the revenues from the petroleum sector should be managed and the country's fiscal regime compared with other countries competing for similar petroleum investments.

In his opening remarks, Nana Juaben-Boaten Siriboe, Chief Director of the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning, said Ghana was not oblivious of the myriad of crisis that had engulfed countries exploring oil.

Nana Siriboe said Ghana was adopting a systematic approach among other oil-rich countries to establish the economic, technical and legal framework needed to manage oil extraction and maximize the benefits to be derived from it.

He said the government had constituted a team of experts who had been assigned the task of developing a "master plan" to guide the development and management of the oil industry and how it interfaced with other sectors of the economy.

Nana Siriboe told the participants to be guided by the lessons from the fiscal regime of the mining sector to design the fiscal regime for the oil sector.

He said the discovery of offshore oil and gas deposits made the country's prospects of transforming the economy into a middle-income status in the shortest possible time more likely.