A U.K. auditing firm Thursday rejected claims made by Russian media this week that energy-rich Turkmenistan massively overstated the size of reserves at a key gas field.
Gaffney, Cline and Associates, which undertook an independent audit on the South Yolotan and Yashlar fields in 2008, said it stood by its findings, after the Vremya Novestei daily reported Turkmenistan had falsified data.
"As stated by GCA at the time of the report, the data provided to GCA (both well data and seismic) were fully adequate to support the results which were published," the firm said in a press release. "Further, these results were the product of GCAs original and independent work on the base data and not dependent upon any previous interpretations made by Turkmen or other international specialists."
The Russian report, which cited unnamed sources in the highly-secretive state's oil and gas sector, came a day after Turkmen President Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov sacked several top energy officials for incompetence.
GCA said it had issued the statement in response to "various unnamed sources" who had called into question the accuracy of their auditing work.
Turkmenistan, an ex-Soviet state courted by China and the European Union for its massive supplies of natural gas, has been locked in a pricing row with Russian energy giant OAO Gazprom (GAZP.RS) since a pipeline explosion earlier this year.
Turkmen officials say South Yolotan holds at least 4 trillion to 6 trillion cubic meters of gas and possibly as much as 14 trillion, numbers that have been confirmed by GCA.
Turkmenistan's then-president Saparmurat Niyazov announced the discovery of the field in the east of the country in 2006, saying at the time that it was among the world's largest.
In June, energy-hungry China agreed to loan Turkmenistan $3 billion to develop the field, according to Turkmen state media reports.