From someone who works in Thailand do not get too hung up on the...

From someone who works in Thailand do not get too hung up on the “apparent” rates for royalty taxes. Nobody from CVN appears to worried about it, and they are at the pointy end.

The Thai taxation system is complex enough to give lessons to the Australian system. There is the royalty rate for sure, however there are write offs for exploration costs, development costs, field setup costs, operational costs. Couple this with preferential rates for resource development and honeymoon rates on new developments and it really gets complex. Add in a touch of the usual corruption and it is anybodies guess what the taxation (real or whatever) will actually be, and also when it is actually leveraged.

Suffice to say there are lots of oil and gas majors and minors from all parts of the world bidding for leases so it cannot be too bad. Thailand would dearly love to not be importing petroleum products as the government subsidises most products to the market, so the government is not going to make it uncommercial for companies to explore and develop in Thailand.

Cheers

Jami