One of the world’s newest and poorest countries, East Timor in Southeast Asia, could still be a success story even with expectations that its oil fields will run dry by 2022 and its sovereign oil fund will be emptied by 2027, East Timor’s former leader Jose Ramos-Horta told Al Jazeera on the sidelines of a conference in Fiji. Oil revenues accounted for 78 percent of East Timor’s budget for 2017, and the country has been heavily relying on oil income to try to grow out of poverty. “Unlike many other oil and gas producing nations, we immediately created a sovereign wealth fund. We started with £250m and now we have more than $16bn in the bank,” said Ramos-Horta, who served as prime minister of East Timor from 2006 to 2007 and as president from 2007 to 2012, and won the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize along with Carlos Filipe Ximenes […]