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The overall objective of this article is to analyze critically the legal instruments that regulate decommissioning of onshore and offshore platforms in the Nigerian Petroleum Industry vis-à-vis other jurisdictions such as USA, UK, and South Africa with a view to making requisite recommendations for improvement in the Nigerian Petroleum Industry. These recommendations are made against the backdrop of Nigeria’s experience of militancy in the Niger Delta Region between 1999 to 2015 which were necessitated by the complacency and poor or no Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) mechanisms of the multi-national companies in the Region and weak oil and gas legislations in Nigeria. It is palpable that the militancy was engendered by political, religious, ethnic, and more importantly, economic reasons. The economic reason was anchored on 5 decades of irredeemable ecological devastation of the region by the oil companies exploration and exploitation activities. To this end, this work recommends that a comprehensive legal framework on decommissioning is urgently required to be enacted due to the fact that the 170 petroleum platforms in the Niger Delta Region are nearing their useful lifetime.

Energy has been always the focus of attention since the establishment of the WTO.The significance of this issue was doubled when the major energy-producing countries states sought to join the WTO.To join the WTO,many energy-producing and energy-exporting states inevitably needed to modify and change their own laws.The adoption of a dual pricing policy by the applicant countries appears as one of the controversial issues in this regard.By determining lower energy prices for their domestic producers,the energy-rich countries provide them with a superior position relative to their international rivals.From the perspective of some energy-importing countries,such behaviors are seen as subsidizes.Iran as one of the largest energy-rich states,has been seeking about twenty years to join the WTO.Iran subsidizes its domestic producers to support its energy sector and infant industries.This article focused on examining the pricing policies,and in particular,the approach to determine the price of energy in Iran.In addition,we studied of the impact of the pricing method of the energy sector in Iran on the process of its accession to the WTO by a comparative evaluation of the accession process of the energy-producing countries such asRussia andSaudi Arabia to the WTO.Through studying the laws and regulations of the energy sector of Iran, one can realize that Iran has been distancing from DP in recent years and is striving to approach the price of its energy to the global price by benefiting fromthe experiences of the performance of the membercountries of the WTO aimed at accelerating the process of its accession to the WTO

One of the most critical bottlenecks in the country’s oil industry is the lack of sufficient liquidity and a suitable and codified method for financing projects in the downstream sector of Iran’s oil and gas industry. These projects include the construction of oil and gas refineries and petrochemical plants. Oil and gas projects require a very high volume of investment, and the limited financial resources and insufficient attractiveness of the currently defined instruments do not meet the new investment needs of downstream projects to achieve the 1404 vision. Therefore, in this article, due to the novelty of the issue, numerous interviews were conducted with staff and operational managers and other relevant officials in the field of financing the downstream part of the oil and gas industry. Then, with the help of Maxqda software, all independent ideas in the form of concepts and sub-themes were identified. With the help of the Delphi method based on the process of Islamic financial engineering based on responding to existing needs by identifying the needs of the parties to the transaction, asset base, and related cash flow analysis, appropriate structured instrument in this sector were designed in six instruments. From experts and related tests, as well as analysis and comparison of their various risks by AHP using Expert Choice software, finally based on the tests performed on the results obtained from questionnaires and interviews of experts, structured financing instrument in the form of convertible securities parallel Istisna Sukuk–Lease (Ijarah) and Sukuk–stock was approved.

The pipeline project, Nord Stream 2 (NS2), has been an issue of controversies. Russia and Germany consider the project an economic contract, but the United-States and Eastern European countries have concerns about its geopolitical effects. These disputes have created a divide in Europe and have posed a threat to trans-Atlantic relations. The current research suggests NS2 can influence the strategic balance between great powers in the international system, giving energy leverage to Russia against United-States, and consequently to China by strengthening projects like the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Our findings put forward that not only NS2, in case of realization, is a source of American decline, but also the debates on the issue are a sign of American struggling for protecting its precarious international position. By placing Europe in front of the United-States, NS2 could be one component of European strategic autonomy (ESA); meanwhile, it may jeopardize ESA by depending on Europe on Russia. Europe’s solution to gain ESA is to use its leverages such as normative one to manage the situation for outcomes like protecting Europe’s unity and economic interests.

International oil and gas investment disputes constitute an important part of Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) system. Investment arbitration which considers as a prevalent dispute settlement mechanism in this area is under serious criticisms, since it endures huge costs, causes length of process and devastates the parties’ long-term investment relationship. In the recent years, possibility of applying Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) and hybrid dispute settlement mechanisms have largely discussed. Mediation-Arbitration (“ Med-arb”) ; is one of the hybrid and integrated dispute settlement mechanisms which embodies flexibility, non-judicial and negotiate-oriented benefits of mediation and finality advantage of arbitration simultaneously and in a single process ( not in separate processes). In this method, mediation is first attempted by the parties before arbitration could be started, If no settlement is reached during mediation phase, then the appointed neutral or mediator, will act as independent arbitrator(s) and proceed the case under the arbitration process and will render a binding arbitration award. In this method, if parties reach an agreement during the first phase (mediation process), they will not incur huge costs of lengthy investment arbitration. In this method, even If the first stage (mediation process) fails, since mediation process made the disputes more clarified and narrower, then the arbitration process is less lengthy and arbitration will be proceeded more efficiently. Moreover, both investors and host- states in oil and gas investment area, do have strong ambitions to maintain the investment relationships. These goals are achieved better via adopting med-arb proceedings.

This study was conducted to determine the effect of the asymmetric oil price shock, tax revenues, resource curse, stock market, and business cycles of Iran by using the structural vector auto regression model (SVAR) for the 1984-2018 period. According to results of the estimated SVAR model, an impulse imposed by the duration of sanctions on oil exports led to an 89% increase in production gap, and impulses caused by liquidity and stock price led to 86% and 53% rises in production gap, respectively. Variation in oil and foreign exchange earnings results in different and even conflicting changes in foreign and domestic sectors of the economy, which subsequently affect the economic performance positively or negatively. Regarding economic structure and principles, a constant increased exchange rate leads to economic growth while a cross-sectional increment in exchange rate does not lead to any economic prosperity. Increased exchange rate and decreased domestic money weakness will increase foreign debt, which in turn causes liquidity shortage. Overall, the liquidity shortage of economic firms has a negative impact on the return of stock and business cycles. Hence, policymakers must pay considerable attention to macroeconomic indicators.

Unlike many arbitrations, the arbitration procedure for price reviews in gas industry contracts is not based on allegations that one party has breached a contract or otherwise committed a legal wrong. Instead, arbitrators are asked to determine whether the economics of a contract has been changed in the market, and thus should be adjusted and, if so, to establish a new price formula. Due to the complexity of revision of gas prices, the gas experts have significant role in these arbitrations. Regarding the role of gas experts, gas price arbitrations have specific nature. In this article, the nature of these arbitrations is examined to establish whether they are arbitration or expert determination as one of Alternative Dispute Resolutions (ADR). As Iran has the second proven natural gas resources worldwide and is the third natural gas producer in the world, so, Iran- Turkey case will come under scrutiny in this article.

Protecting shareholders’ rights today is considered a practical competitive function at the level of capital markets, which is based on transparent and coherent actions within the framework of laws and regulations. In other words, the more the level of company operations is based on regulatory and legal procedures, the more level of protection of shareholders’ interests can be expected to be observed more uniformly by companies. This study aims to design a forensic accounting model focusing on protecting shareholders’ rights of petrochemical companies. The collection tool based on the analytical nature of the research consisted of two parts: evaluation checklist and matrix checklists. In fact, in order to promote the level of innovation in the relationship between forensic processes and quantitative accounting to collect data for the development of the forensic accounting model, through meta-synthesis and Delphi analysis, the components and propositions of forensic accounting were determined in the qualitative section, focusing on the protection of shareholders’ rights; then based on the matrix checklist, the most influential research propositions were determined through the analysis of fuzzy networks. The research results in the qualitative part indicate the existence of three components of structural mechanisms; it was the meta-structural and legalization of forensic accounting to protect shareholders’ rights, which was approved in the form of 18 statements. Further, the results in the quantitative part concerning the analysis of fuzzy networks were identified. The most effective component of forensic accounting in the protection of shareholders’ rights was structural mechanisms, and the most influential statements of forensic accounting in the protection of 

Strategic management contexts usually define a couple of activities, including preparing a mission statement, which is one of the essential parts in developing the strategic plan of an organization. Numerous researches in the strategic management literature have expressed the attributes of an effectively written mission statement for a firm in general. Although the corporate mission statement and its components vary from industry to industry, none of the researchers have specifically studied the components of a corporate mission statement in the petroleum industry. In this study, the general components of the corporate mission statement were extracted and listed based on the strategic management literature review. Then, the most important components of the corporate mission statement specific to the petroleum industry were selected using the industry experts’ opinions. The grey systems theory was utilized to aggregate the expert judgments that are qualitative in nature. Fourteen components for the petroleum industry corporate mission statement were selected as the research results. Whether developing a new business or reformulating direction for an ongoing company in the petroleum industry, these specific components should be included in the content of the corporate mission statement.