The Egyptian Ministry of Petroleum announced that Saudi Arabian state oil company Aramco will resume oil product shipments to Egypt some six months after suddenly halting them.
 
An official at Egypt's Petroleum Ministry told Reuters that the shipments would resume very shortly.
 
"Very shortly we will finalise the time and place for receiving shipments from Aramco," the official, who declined to be identified because he was not authorised to speak to the media, told Reuters.
 
Asked if shipments would resume within weeks, the official said: "No, no, we are talking about a very short time period."
 
Saudi Arabia agreed in April last year to provide Egypt with 700,000 tonnes of refined oil products per month for five years but the cargoes stopped arriving in early October as festering political tensions burst into the open.  

The ministry said in a statement it was working out a timetable with Aramco for the resumption of shipments and that commercial reasons related to global oil prices and reduced production were behind the suspension in October.
 
"It was agreed that the Saudi Arabian side would resume Aramco's shipping of oil products as per the commercial contract signed between the Egyptian General Petroleum Corporation and Aramco," the statement said.

Egypt voted in favour of a Russian-backed but Saudi-opposed U.N. resolution on Syria in October, which excluded calls to stop bombing Aleppo. Then in January an Egyptian court rejected a government plan to transfer two uninhabited Red Sea islands to Saudi Arabia

Egypt had turned to the spot market in recent months but also sought similar deals to make up the shortfall. Crude oil from Iraq is expected to arrive in late March as part of an agreement for 1 million barrels a month.

The Head of Egyptian General Authority for Petroleum, Tariq al-Hadidi, said, last February, that his country is negotiating to import one million barrels per month of Iraqi crude oil for a year. The Egyptian Minister of Petroleum Tariq Mulla, told Reuters, that a delegation will visit Iraq to approve the final draft of the agreement to import oil.