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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | April 2008 
Mexico PRI Opposition Welcomes Energy Plan
 Cyntia Barrera Diaz - Reuters
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Mexico City - A key Mexican opposition party said on Wednesday it liked the look of a government plan to reform the energy sector and offered to work on ironing out wrinkles in the bill.
President Felipe Calderon's government handed Congress a compromise energy reform plan on Tuesday that could attract foreign companies to a hunt for new oil reserves to rescue falling output in the world's No. 5 crude producer.
Calderon needs the support of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, to pass the reform, aimed at finding more oil in deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico and halting a decline in production.
The PRI, which has backed other economic reforms by Calderon, said it welcomed the energy proposal.
"They took into account a good part of the premises that the PRI in the Senate had put on the table," senior PRI Sen. Manlio Fabio Beltrones told Reuters.
The plan was watered down to omit a controversial clause allowing state oil monopoly Pemex to form risk-sharing joint ventures, but it sets out a new system of service contracts based on incentive fees that could attract foreign companies to Mexico's quest to ramp up oil output and reserves.
But Beltrones said the proposal was not perfect.
"We see insufficiencies in it. These can be patched up in a discussion in the Senate and in modifications that the bill needs to make it richer in ideas," he said.
The government will submit an additional energy reform proposal that would lower the tax rate for state-oil monopoly Pemex, Finance Minister Agustin Carstens said.
"The complementary (bill) will above all modify federal tax laws so that Pemex's tax burden falls," he told reporters.
(Additional reporting by Catherine Bremer in Mexico City, editing by Matthew Lewis) |
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