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Oman’s plans for a fourth LNG train at the Qalhat Industrial Complex is an indication of the robust health of the regional LNG market and follows a trend already established in other Gulf producers of gas.

Noor Bint Ali Al-Khulaif was appointed to head the EDB in mid-February, taking over from Khalid Humaidan who is now governor of Central Bank of Bahrain.

After a 12-year gap, Saudi Arabia has reopened its diplomatic base in Damascus, although ambassador Faisal Bin Saud Al-Mejfel has yet to take up his post in the Syrian capital.

The General Company for Ports of Iraq and the Ministry of Transport launched an appeal in a US court in mid-September, in the latest attempt to frustrate a $120m arbitral award owed to Cyprus-based Archirodon Construction.

Abdulwahid Qarata won a run-off vote on 14 September, coming from behind to beat Ibrahim Al-Sheikh who had topped the poll in the first round of voting a week earlier.

Iran’s ambassador to Beirut, Mojtaba Amani, was among those injured when explosives hidden in pagers were detonated across Lebanon on the afternoon of 17 September, in a campaign targeting members of Hizbollah and the group’s allies.

Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shiaa Al-Sudani's government has launched Iraq down a perilous fiscal path, with an extravagant three-year budget for 2023-25 which gained Council of Representatives (Majlis an-Nuwwab or parliament) approval.

Saudi government-owned broadcaster MBC has found itself in hot water, after running a report which described recently-killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar as a ‘new face of terrorism’. Media regulators in Saudi Arabia are looking into the matter, while the authorities in Baghdad have shut down its local office and started the process of revoking its licence.

The Kurdistan Democratic Party secured a solid win in the KRI’s long-waited 20 October vote, winning 39 seats against the 23 secured by its main challenger, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. In a toxic atmosphere the two rivals  now have to hammer out a deal to form the next Kurdistan Regional Government – a process that took ten months last time around.

Oman’s state-owned energy group OQ is preparing to list a minority stake in its Base Industries subsidiary on the Muscat Stock Exchange, following the bourse debut of its OQ Exploration and Production division in late October.

KIO allegations: Finance minister Fahd Al-Jarallah has referred the Kuwait Investment Authority’s London outpost, the Kuwait Investment Office (KIO), to the public prosecutor over a series of alleged offences including the illegal disclosure of confidential information between 2018-22. The move was announced by the Ministry of Finance on 16 October.

Emir Mishaal Al-Ahmed’s appointee as prime minister is a former ambassador to the US, who served in government for a decade from 2001, before resigning over a corruption scandal.

Many issues that have divided senior Al-Sabahs seem to have been resolved at a major parley between opposing players in the Kuwaiti ruling family.

A year after the risk of a catastrophic accident at the abandoned oil storage vessel FSO Safer was finally resolved – after long periods during which Houthi rebels repeatedly blocked an international rescue mission – the Sanaa-based group’s actions are once again creating the risk of an environmental disaster is the waters around Yemen.  

The EU has offered support to the latest Saudi effort to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, promising to hold a summit in Brussels later this month for the Global Alliance for the Implementation of the Two-State Solution. At the first EU-GCC summit, held in mid-October, the Europeans also agreed to revive discussions on a trade deal, some 16 years after talks were suspended due to differences over human rights.