Though Libya's short-term oil potential is waning, officials at a Malta summit said they were confident economic prosperity would come to the nation's people.
The board of directors at the Libyan Investment Authority met in Malta for their first annual meeting this week as violence lingers in the North African country. LIA Chairman Hassan Bouhadi said the investment authority is independent from political issues in a dividing country.
"LIA's assets are protected and the fund aims to develop these investments to establish economic prosperity for the Libyan people," he was quoted Thursday by the Libya Herald as saying.
U.S. Ambassador to Libya Deborah K. Jones wrote in a February piece in the Libyan newspaper the country may go broke if oil continues to get caught in the cross fire. Oil, she wrote, is "essentially the country's only source of income."
Libyan oil production as of February was around 311,000 barrels per day, a 10 percent decline from the previous month. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries said exports from member-state Libya were less than 200,000 bpd.
The state-owned National Oil Corp. in early March declared force majeure over nearly a dozen fields, saying it could no longer ensure production at the facilities due to the deteriorating security situation.
A terrorist manual reviewed Friday by the Wall Street Journal outlines how the oil industry in Libya should be targeted to starve administrators and Western companies of revenue.
The U.N. Support Mission in Libya said last month "the terrorists are the ones who benefit from the continuing fighting and divisions" in Libya.
