Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

brooklyn13, Gee, a missile. That said it's good no one was killed. Yeah, Yemen, another area in which peace could have been negotiated and maintained if all actors were more fucking fairly minded.

I have just come across another good article on the history of the Yemen area and am now in the process of looking for a good place to post it. As you may have noticed i like to link posts to create some continuity in some areas. Heh, here is a little factoid just bumped into i had completely forgotten which you, since you are so adamant Israel has little blame to share in the mess in the region, should be more than interested in. Should be:

Israel's $1.1 billion theft from Iran - UAE Deal Boosts Israeli Oil Pipeline Secretly Built With Iran
[...]
It starts with an under-used but highly strategic pipeline. Stepping cautiously out of the shadows, the Israeli managers of Europe Asia Pipeline Co. .. https://www.eapc.com/ (EAPC) say their 158-mile conduit from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean Sea provides both a cheaper alternative to Egypt’s Suez Canal and an option to connect to the Arab pipeline grid that transports oil and gas not just to the region, but to the seaports that supply the world. “It opens a lot of doors and opportunities,” the pipeline company’s CEO, Izik Levi, told Foreign Policy. He reckons that the pipeline, which connects Israel’s southern port of Eilat with a tanker terminal in Ashkelon on the Mediterranean coast, could nip off a significant share of the oil shipments now flowing through the nearby Suez Canal.
[...]
Much of the early oil flow appears to have been brokered by billionaire commodities trader Marc Rich .. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/16/business/media/16rich.html , who was later indicted in the United States for continuing to trade with Iran after the 1979 Islamic revolution, when it was declared an enemy state. Rich was pardoned in 2001 by former U.S. President Bill Clinton, who said he was moved in part by appeals from Israeli leaders and intelligence chiefs. The rogue trader’s backers, including former Israeli Prime Ministers Shimon Peres and Ehud Barak, said he had repeatedly rescued the Jewish state from efforts to destroy it. Rich, who was never convicted, died in 2013.

A Swiss court ordered Israel in 2015 to pay Iran compensation of about $1.1 billion as a share of profits from the joint ownership of the pipeline since the two enemies broke off relations in 1979, but Israel has refused to pay up.

While the company’s main 42-inch pipeline was built to transport Iranian oil north to the Mediterranean, it now does most of its business in reverse. It can pump oil unloaded in Ashkelon from ships sent by producers such as Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan to tankers in the Gulf of Aqaba for transport to China, South Korea, or elsewhere in Asia. Running parallel to the crude pipeline is a 16-inch tube carrying petroleum products such as gasoline and diesel. The company also makes money from operating storage tanks at its shipping terminals.

The lengths to which its pipeline’s customers go to obscure
their identities are legendary.

The pipeline’s advantage over the Suez is the ability of the terminals in Ashkelon and Eilat to accommodate the giant supertankers that dominate oil shipping today, but are too big to fit through the canal. Known in oilspeak as VLCCs, or very large crude carriers, the ships can transport as much as 2 million barrels of petroleum. The 150-year-old Suez Canal, on the other hand, is only deep and wide enough to handle so-called Suezmax vessels, with just half the capacity of a VLCC. Oil traders thus have to charter two ships through the canal for every one they send via Israel. With one-way fees through the Suez reaching $300,000-$400,000, Levi says the pipeline allows Israel to offer a significant discount.

The company’s business has always been one of Israel’s most closely guarded secrets. Even today, EAPC releases no financial statements. Levi says he can’t disclose the names of customers—though he says they include “some of the biggest companies in the world.” What little information that is publicly known only came to light as the result of legal battles following a 2014 rupture in the pipeline that caused the worst environmental disaster .. https://www.ft.com/content/6260b762-c067-11e5-846f-79b0e3d20eaf .. in Israeli history, spilling more than 1.3 million gallons of crude oil into the Ein Evrona desert nature preserve.

If EAPC’s books are opaque, the lengths to which its customers go to obscure their identities through multiple registrations and other corporate cloaking techniques are legendary. The boycott enforced by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and their oil-producing neighbors meant that tankers acknowledging their docking in Israel would be barred from future loadings in the Persian Gulf, effectively destroying their business. The details are highly confidential—but generally the ways ships can obscure their activities include turning off their transponders, repainting, reflagging, reregistering, and faking their docking records.

Levi, a retired captain in the Israeli navy, told Foreign Policy that the required secrecy made the pipeline route too expensive for most shipments. “Many ships that came to Eilat and Ashkelon had to do such and such operations in order that they would not be boycotted in one or another port. If the ship fears it will be blacklisted and boycotted, that gets priced in. All that costs me money so the price for transportation will go up.”

EAPC’s business model improves dramatically with the erosion of the Arab boycott. “If the concerns [with secrecy] go down significantly, the price will drop significantly,” Levi said. “Then it becomes economically feasible and even more worthwhile.” Once political barriers to using Israel as a transshipment hub are removed, business could boom. After the Israeli-UAE deal is formalized, other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council are likely to follow, most likely Bahrain and Oman. Saudi Arabia has indicated it won’t establish formal links until the Palestinian conflict is resolved, although its business connections with Israel are plentiful and growing.

Levi says his goal is for the pipeline to capture between 12 percent
and 17 percent of the oil business that now uses the Suez.

https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=158634048

To be sure you know the juvenile sarcasm in your "Happy days are here again!" does not go unnoticed. At least you managed one post without taking a more direct invalid swipe at me. Do that a few more times and i might stop dwelling upon what a total asshole you have been for so long.