ABSTRACT
The economic gains under the new law include an overall increase of taxes, even though some of the present taxes, like, for example, the tax set up by the law of buoys and lighthouses, will be abolished. Conclusive evidence is provided by the following quotation from the preamble by the Colombian Minister of Mines and Petroleum, Nestor Pineda, to a bill proposed in 1942 for ‘State intervention in the oil industry’. As Dr Pérez Alfonzo points out, we need two basic statistics in order to be able to work out the true income of the oil companies: the real value of their investments in this country, and the production cost per barrel of oil. In 1954, after the overthrow of that great man Mosadegh, this group carried out a piece of financial wizardry in Iran, in which the very close interrelations between oil and diplomacy came out in a very striking way.
