ABSTRACT
In 1960 steps were taken to prepare an amendment to the Petroleum Law in order to correct some of the anomalies, as well as errors and ambiguities of wording, in the 1955 Law, and also to make it more comparable with contemporary concession conditions elsewhere. The Royal Decree amending the Law was promulgated on 3 July 1961 and published in the Official Gazette on 15 July 1961. This Amendment freed the Petroleum Commission from the obligation to grant concessions at any time to any qualified applicant — an unprecedented self-imposed constraint on a sovereign power. Since the 1955 Law stipulated that the contractual rights expressly created by a concession should not be altered except by mutual consent of the parties, the Government was unwilling unilaterally to impose the 1961 Amendment on existing concessionaires, and sought the agreement of each one to amend its own concession deeds to the new terms.
