Calmer waters in Timor Leste?

A new exploration deal should benefit Timor-Leste and may point to a breakthrough in a maritime dispute with Australia

In April Australia's Timor Resources became the first private oil and gas company in more than 40 years to win the right to explore and develop Timor-Leste's onshore fields when it signed two production-sharing contracts with state-owned authority AMPM. The deal, which covers two blocks, marks a breakthrough in the impoverished, recently independent country's long-planned $2bn project to establish a petroleum corridor along its southern coast. The deal is all the more surprising because Timor-Leste, formerly known as East Timor, is still embroiled in a dispute over maritime zones with Australia that finally ended up in The Hague's Permanent Court of Arbitration in mid-2016, despite Canberra'