What does SOC stand for?

Iraq's Southern Oil Company will hold the remaining 25%.

We look forward to signing the final agreement in the near future, and to many, many years of cooperation with our colleagues in the Southern Oil company and here in the (oil) ministry," Exxon's president of upstream activities Richard Vierbuchen told reporters at a preliminary signing ceremony in Baghdad.

BP's current stake, according to industry sources, is 50 per cent and CNPC's 25 per cent, while Iraq's Southern Oil Company holds the rest.

A veteran of the Shi'a uprising in southern Iraq of 1991, Juma'a had begun to speak openly about the bad conditions in the fields and refinery of the Southern Oil Company (SOC) where he'd worked for three decades.

As a country that has just come out of a war we need the income," echoes Sameer Jassim, Iraq's Southern Oil Company spokesman.

Sadr's threat to attack the oil industry forced Iraq's Southern Oil Company to stop pumping from nearby oilfields to storage tanks in Basra.

An Iraqi military spokesman claimed: "US and British warplanes raided the Southern Oil Company in Basra.

The final chapter is essentially a sum up of the report and contains expert recommendation about investment in the Iraqi oil industry Companies mentioned include: Iraq National Oil Company (INOC), State Company for Oil Projects (SCOP), Oil Exploration Company (OEC), Northern Oil Company (NOC), Southern Oil Company (SOC), State Organization for Marketing of Oil (SOMO), Sonatrach, BHP, Pacific, Shell, Bow, Nexen, CNPC, Total, Reliance, Pertamina, Eni, Japex, Petronas, Crescent, Bashneft, Lukoil, Mashinoimport, Strovexport, Tatneft, Zarubezhneft, Korean Consortium, Repsol, SPC, ETAP, TPAO and PetroVietnam.