Operation Oil Theft: Week 2. Day 4.

The international conference on Libya that was held in London has just broken up. Despite much talk of the conference aiming to deepen international support for military operations against Libya, increase humanitarian aid for Libyan civilians and drawing up plans for Qaddafi to leave power the whole conference only lasted for three hours. With 35 nations and international bodies represented this gave each delegation just 5 minutes to speak.

The conference though did find time to achieve it's main objective. Qatar will now, very kindly, act as the Libyan rebels oil merchant. That means Qatar will now sell the small amounts of oil that are produced in rebel held areas of Libya on the world market and collect the money from those sales on the rebels behalf. Obviously UN resolution 1973(2011) prevents Qatar from then passing on any of that money to the rebels. Qatar has also offered to host the first meeting of a contact group with the rebels at a date yet to be announced. The purpose of this contact group is to assist some of the rebels, most likely Mustafa Abdul Jalil, to form themselves into enough of a governing body to get the UN to consider lifting sanctions. In the meantime the oil gets pumped and the rebels don't get paid.