In a damning indictment, the CAG has said Oil Ministry and its technical arm DGH approved notification of now flagging gas discoveries in Reliance Industries’ KG-D6 block despite the company not doing enough appraisal.
RIl had found gas in the Dhirubhai-1 and 3 wells in October 2002 and were declared commercially viable finds between April 2003 and March 2004. It in May 2004 claimed the finds to hold 8.3 trillion cubic feet of inplace gas reserves, the CAG said in a draft audit report of KG-D6 block. The DGH approved a $2.47 billion initial development plan for the two finds by lowering the inplace reserves to 5.45 Tcf and recoverable resource to 3.81 Tcf with first gas coming in August 2006.
However before the start of commercial production, RIl in October 2006 submitted changes in the development plan by raising the capex requirement to $8.8 billion in two phases and putting recoverable reserves at 12.04 Tcf out of inplace volumes of 14.164 Tcf. New Delhi: MasterCard and Visa have formed a new cross-industry group to further ramp up security of payment systems, in a bid to ensure more secure transactions for consumers, retailers and financial institutions.
The group includes banks, credit unions, acquirers, retailers, point-of-sale device manufacturers and industry trade groups. “The formation of the group is a public recognition of the importance of all parties to work together and will ensure all voices can contribute to the strategic direction of payment security,” Visa said in a statement. The group will initially focus on adoption of EMV chip technology in the US in addition to addressing other security-related topics like tokenisation and point-to-point encryption. EMV will be the next step in these efforts, alongside enhanced security solutions for online and mobile channels, he added.