Egypt expects to receive Iraqi crude in mid-May

CAIRO - 11 May 2017: Egypt expects the first crude oil shipment from Iraq under a bilateral agreement to arrive in mid-May, an Egyptian oil ministry official said on Thursday.

Under the agreement reached last month by Egypt and Iraq, Baghdad is to sell 12 million barrels of oil to Egypt for a year.

Iraq began last Thursday to load a tanker with 2 million barrels of crude oil for export to Egypt.

In the meantime, Saudi Aramco has resumed supplying Egypt with about 700,000 tonnes of petroleum per month at the end of March after it stopped in October, the official said.

The resumption follows a statement in March by the Egyptian Petroleum Ministry, which said it expected Saudi Arabia to resume oil product shipments by the end of March or early April.

Although officials from both sides have denied the existence of tensions between the two countries, they have been at odds on political issues such as Syria and the status of two islands in the Red Sea.