Great. Thank you.
Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman and members of the committee. It's a great honour to be able to present to your committee today.
I'm here representing Petrobank Energy and Resources Ltd., but I'm also representing a subsidiary of ours, Petrominerales Ltd., which is a Bogota-based oil and gas exploration company.
For a little bit of background, I have personally been doing business in Colombia since 1992 with the past three companies I've been involved in. I first went there about November of 1992. I most recently was in Colombia last week with my wife and four-month-old baby.
Petrominerales, our Colombian-based subsidiary, is a Toronto Stock Exchange-listed company. It's owned 76% by Petrobank. It's owned 24% by the general public. We have a current market capitalization of about $1.7 billion and we are 100% focused in Colombia.
Petrominerales is a major investor in Colombia, along with a number of other successful TSX-listed companies. We have many happy shareholders, and we have been fortunate both to have some success in the oil and gas business in Colombia as well as to be able to take advantage of recent upticks in the price of oil on the international markets.
Petrominerales is in the business of exporting Canadian expertise and capital and of repatriating profits. A good question to ask is why we would choose Colombia.
From both personal experience and experience with the many people who have worked with us in Colombia, Colombia represents for us the best combination of geological opportunity, fiscal regime, and geopolitical stability in the international exploration world.
Colombia has put in place a solid fiscal regime of royalties and taxes and a regulatory environment that we believe is second to none on a combined basis in the international oil and gas business. Colombia has demonstrated extremely strong business continuity, sanctity of contracts, and assurances from government that have meant that the political risk of doing business in Colombia is de minimis.
Colombia has also put in place a very strong regulatory and environmental framework, which we're very happy to work within, and we find many similarities between the Colombian regulatory framework and the Canadian, particularly Albertan, regulatory framework.
Perhaps the single biggest asset that we're able to encounter in our operations in Colombia is the Colombian people. We find them to be a well-educated, highly motivated, extremely passionate, and strongly nationalistic people who are prepared to work hard and build a better Colombia for themselves and their grandchildren.
There are also many brilliant initiatives that the Government of Colombia has undertaken, which we have actually been strong proponents of bringing back to the Canadian regulatory framework. If I could just highlight one of those, an interesting facet of the Colombian royalty regime on oil and gas exploration is that, by legislation and by law, a specific percentage of every royalty dollar earned from the production of oil and gas in operations in Colombia is returned to the municipality from which that oil production was originally received and to the province from which that oil production was originally produced.
The net effect of this is that the local governments and the provincial governments of Colombia are able to participate fully in the success of any resource development that occurs in their area. They're able to receive direct funding in direct reference to the amount of oil that's produced in their region, which allows them to sustain a strong infrastructure framework as well as to be able to create some long-lasting institutional investments in the form of social infrastructure, such as schools, hospitals, and so on.
That's a great example of how the oil industry and the government have worked together to create a positive feedback loop in the country. Actually, in my opinion anyway, had such a system been put in place in areas like Alberta and some of the other regions of Canada where there are currently some serious disconnects between local industry and investors, there would be a much better continuity in Canada today.
We're big believers in implementing a north-south relationship over the long term. We think Canada's initiative to undertake a free trade agreement with Colombia and other nations in Latin America is an excellent opportunity to broaden Canada's scope and positive influence in the region. We believe Canada can take the lead right now.
From our perspective, we're not concerned with tariffs. We're not concerned with bilateral trade. We would like to have a very open and transparent relationship with the Colombian government. We have a strong tax treaty, reciprocal investment protection, and improved access to high-quality transfer of some of the best and brightest people. Some of the best and brightest people from Colombia are working for us in Canada now; some of the best and brightest in Canada are working for us in Bogota at this moment. We believe that's an excellent way to build and foster a strong relationship in the region, and we believe Colombia is an excellent place to start that relationship.