Dana Gas said it received Dh271 million in the first eight months as payment from Pearl Petroleum for condensate sales in Iraq's Kurdistan region.

 

The payment includes Dh27.9m for September, the Sharjah-based energy producer said in a statement on Monday. Dana Gas, which is a 35 per cent shareholder in Pearl Petroleum, said Pearl has no outstanding receivables in the KRG.

 

Pearl is a consortium led by Dana Gas and its parent Crescent Petroleum that operates concessions in Iraqi Kurdistan.

 

"The continued arrival of these payments on time provides both us and our partners with the confidence to push forward aggressively with our expansion plans," said Patrick Allman-Ward, chief executive of Dana Gas. "We are on track to bring on-stream the incremental gas from our debottlenecking project in the next few weeks."

 

The project will raise gas production by a quarter when it is fully operational and is expected to add $50m annually to Dana Gas' bottom line and boost its local power generation capacity, the company said.

 

Dana Gas, which was previously embroiled in a $700m (Dh2.57 billion) sukuk dispute, has completed refinancing the Islamic bond instrument, that has been sized down to $530m. This will free it up to move forward with its exploration and development plans for its assets in Kurdistan and Egypt, it said last month.

 

In July, Dana Gas received about $44m in dividends from the KRG for the first half of 2018. The company expects its output from operations there to rise by 25 per cent in the third quarter.

 

The energy company's main assets are in Egypt and Kurdistan, where it has struggled to collect receivables over the pat few years. Dana Gas reached a financial settlement last year, in which the KRG government agreed to pay Dh2.2 billion to the Pearl Petroleum and another Dh1.5bn to invest in the region’s development.

 

Dana Gas posted a 17 per cent second quarter profit drop due to costs linked to the restructure of its $700m sukuk.