“We have pushed the button for Botas’ privatization,” Mehmet Bilgic told a press conference. “We have decided to have independent auditing for Botas’ account books in the past three years.” By the end of 2006, Bilgic said, Botas will be running 10,000km of pipelines, and by 2015 Turkey’s natural gas consumption will reach an annual 40 billion cubic metres. “Besides, with the completion of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, Botas will be worth a net $12 billion,” he said. Turkey’s government is considering both a block sale and an initial public offering as part of its plans to sell-off Botas. Bilgic also said that the BTC project as a main export route for Caspian oil would be completed as scheduled. “It’s true that there have been delays and we had to speed up our construction program. But the project will be completed on time and within its budgetary limits,” he said. “We don’t want to pay compensation because of delays. I would consider even a single day of delay as failure.”
