Markey to Rice: I want Hunt Oil answers

WASHINGTON, Oct. 3 (UPI) -- The U.S. State Department is being pressed by Congress for information regarding the Dallas-based Hunt Oil deal with Iraq’s Kurdish government.

Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., chairman of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, linked the deal to U.S. dependence on oil and hurting the war effort in a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice Tuesday.

Hunt, ran by a man connected to the Bush administration and the Republican Party, is the first U.S. firm to sign a deal to enter Iraq’s oil sector. But it did so with Iraq’s regional government, which has pressed forward with its economic (and oil sector) development, not the national government, which is struggling to find agreement on national oil legislation.

Baghdad has criticized the Kurdistan Regional Government, calling most of the deals it has signed illegal and criticizing its recently approved regional oil law. On Tuesday the KRG announced it had approved four more contracts and signed two of them with a subsidiary of the Canadian firm Heritage Oil and Gas and a subsidiary of the French firm Perenco S.A.

The U.S. government is pushing for a national framework and has criticized moves that operate outside of it.

Markey’s letter included 12 questions and gave Rice 30 days to respond. They included questions of U.S. knowledge of the deal as well as any concerns because of the relationship between Ray Hunt and the administration.

Hunt is a major fundraiser for Bush and the Republican Party, and he sits on the influential President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board.