Turkey, US; Iraq’s Oil

And so it did.

Using the strong arm of the International Monetary Fund, Washington still forced the Turkish government to sell the nation’s oil company, Tupras, and this month a big multinational signed on the dotted line.

The mulinational in question, Tatneft, doesn’t look like an American company at first glance.

Court documents here say the company buying Tupras is a Russian one fromTataristan in Central Asia in partnership with a German company called Efremov Synthetic Rubber. But closer examination reveals Tataristan’s Tatneft to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange with such Wall Street investors as Barclays and Goldman Sachs. The situation is even murkier for Germany’s Efremov Synthetic Rubber

‘Our bureau in Germany went to the headquarers of this firm,’ says Ihsan Charalan is a collumnist for Turkey’s left-wing Evrensel newspaper. ‘It was the upstairs floor of an apartment building and the people in the neighborhood said the office had a telephone and nothing else.’

The deal is show shady, in fact, that Turkish trade unionists may get some unlikely help from Wall Street.

One of Tatneft’s American investors is considering joining the union in an effort to block the merger. The investment firm Imangement Service Ltd, which holds 5 million dollars worth of Tatneft shares, says the Tatar company has failed to follow both Russian and American financial disclosure requirements. Those statements were echoed by the US Securities and Exchange commission which in June came close to suspending Tatneft’s membership on the New York Stock Exchange when the company failed to meet reporting requirments enacted in the wake of the Enron scandal.