The joint venture, Gasoil Ethiopia Project (GEP), will develop fields in the Ogaden basin where four trillion cubic feet of gas and 13.6 million barrels of associated liquids were discovered in the 1970s, government spokesman Haile Kiros told Reuters.

The Ethiopian government will hold a 20 percent stake in the joint venture and Sicor, based in Houston, Texas, the remainder.

Details of financing were not given. GEP plans to construct a 375-mile, 24-inch gas pipeline to transmit gas to the town of Awash, around 75 miles east of the capital Addis Ababa, on the country's main railway line and highway.

Haile said the joint venture will construct a cryogenic liquid plant to strip mostly liquefied petroleum gas (propane and butane) and condensate from the gas, as well as two gas-to-liquid systems to process dry gas.

The plant would process a total of two billion cubic feet of gas a day into 20,000 bpd of fuel and petrochemical feedstocks. Waste steam would fuel a 168 megawatt power plant, he said.

The joint venture is expected to start 12 months of pre-development work in February with production slated to start in 2002.

Haile said the agreement was hugely important for Ethiopia, where the felling of trees for fuel has caused major deforestation.

An official of the bank told a press conference that of the total 372,057,847.91 birr in outstanding loans as of 30 June, 1998, about 60 percent of the outstanding 23,454,784.11 birr was recovered from 211 borrowers as of 31 October.(one US dollar = 8.00 birr)

The total amount in loans collected in the past 18 months, about 129.71million birr (58 percent of the total collection) was redeemed fully from 199 borrowers, Mulugeta Gebre-Medhin, assistant vice-president of the bank in charge of its analysis and appraisal department, said.

He added that this was equivalent to 94 percent of the total borrowers who have already started to settle their loans through their representatives.

Mulugeta disclosed that a loan balance of over 237.44 million birr, including accumulated interest of 10.5 percent for the past 18 months, is yet to be recovered from 187 deported Eritrean borrowers.

He said the bank had also reached an "amicable" settlement with representatives for procedures to recover some 124.1 million birr of the outstanding loans.

Another 101.4 million birr of the outstanding loans, involving 68 borrowers, are to be settled through foreclosure process.

Mulugeta said the bank is exploring others means to recover the remaining 8.89 million birr of the total loans from 17 defaulters.

Sixty-five percent of the total loans were given to five companies owned by deported Eritreans. The remaining 35 percent were loans given to 381 companies and individuals.

Mulugeta said the bank has advertised for auctioning 127 vehicles and 21 buildings and business premises in Addis Ababa and other towns to recover outstanding loans.

Government spokesman Haile Kiros said in a statement that Ethiopia's concerns had been submitted to the OAU chairman in a "detailed report outlining the shortcomings of the technical arrangements."

In the statement, published in the government press Thursday, Haile described the current technical arrangements as unacceptable. "If a better alternative is not forthcoming, the Ethiopian government will have no other option than to prepare to guarantee the country's sovereignty".

"Recognising Ethiopia's position, the international community should cease its futile attempts to pressure the Ethiopian government to sign the existing technical arrangements," Haile cautioned.

"The current path pursued by international mediators is not the path to a peaceful resolution of the conflict," he observed.

Prime Minister Meles Zenawi Monday said that Addis Ababa will not sign a peace agreement with Eritrea on the basis of the said document, which he rejected for not ensuring the sovereignty of Ethiopian territories still occupied by Eritrea.

Meles stated on state television that the technical arrangements "distorted and revised the original peace proposals approved by the OAU summits in Ouagadougou in 1998 and Algiers in 1999."

He, therefore, noted that only heads of state and governments have the mandate to alter the proposals they had endorsed.

``Ethiopia will not kneel down to any pressure imposed on the country...unless the document is prepared to guarantee the sovereignty of the country,'' Meles said in a television interview late on Monday.

He was referring to a revised peace plan unveiled at an Organisation of African Unity (OAU) summit in Algiers in July.

The draft sought to end 18-months of border hostility between Ethiopia and Eritrea that is thought to have claimed the lives of tens of thousands of soldiers from both sides.

It was also supposed to clarify an earlier OAU proposal, presented in Ouagadougou, which had been accepted by Ethiopia but rejected by Eritrea.

Meles said the latest agreement -- drafted by experts from the United Nations, OAU, United States and Algeria -- was distorted. The original Ouagadougou proposal had been put forward by the OAU alone.

``Only African heads of state and governments have the mandate to change the peace proposals endorsed in the Ouagadougou and Algiers summits,'' Meles said.

The conflict between Eritrea and Ethiopia, which erupted in May last year, has recently fizzled out to a grudging stand-off.

Meles accused the international community of failing to condemn Eritrean aggression while pressuring Ethiopia to sign a document which could not possibly bring a lasting peace.

Last Week Ethiopian Foreign Minister Seyoum Mesfin called the U.S. ``a meddling party'' in the conflict. He said Ethiopia's objections to the revised document centred on a few specific areas, namely:

-- The original plan called for withdrawal of troops from all areas they did not administer before the war, whereas the revised plan called for withdrawal of troops from all disputed areas. Ethiopia argues Eritrea has extended its territorial claims since the conflict began and says it would leave itself vulnerable by pulling out of all disputed areas.

-- The original plan called for OAU observers to monitor border areas, whereas the revised draft called for U.N. peacekeeping troops to be stationed in disputed areas.

-- The original proposal called for the restoration of a civilian administration after troops have withdrawn, whereas the revised plan says civilian rule should only return once territorial disputes have been settled.

The government press reported Friday that the representatives amended the law Thursday with a unanimous vote. The law had prevented any private or party- affiliated candidates working for the government, except political appointees, to stand in national and regional elections. Those wishing to do so were required to resign from their government posts.

Opposition parties that boycotted Ethiopia's first multiparty national and regional elections in June 1995 had complained against the inconveniences of the law.

Several of the opposition groups that attended a seminar in November with the ruling four-party coalition of the Ethiopian Peoples' Revolutionary Democratic Front had called for elimination of the restrictive clause in the law.

They argued, as a number of regional-based parties in Amhara, Oromiya and south Ethiopia regional states that are affiliated with the ruling party, that it had been difficult to find "relatively" educated persons to run for elections.