(Repeats to additional subscribers)
* Legislation is part of larger reform agenda by Santos
* Bill passed despite protests in commodity regions
* 2nd of 3 big fiscal reforms to go through Congress
BOGOTA, June 9 (Reuters) - Colombia's Congress on Thursday passed a key reform to spread billions of dollars in oil and mining royalties more evenly across Latin America's no. 4 crude producer as it seeks to hike exports of oil, coal and metals.
Colombia, the world's No. 4 coal exporter, has seen a boom in oil and mining investment since a 2002 crackdown on illegal armed groups, which has helped ramp up production of petroleum, thermal and metallurgical coal and minerals.
"Today we're creating a new country that's going to have the possibility to develop," Finance Minister Juan Carlos Echeverry told reporters. "We'll have savings to combat Dutch disease, we're going to have resources for the whole country."
President Juan Manuel Santos' reform plans to centralize how royalties are managed to more evenly distribute around $3 billion a year nationwide and stamp out inefficiency and corrupt abuses of regional commodity resources.
The constitutional reform has faced opposition by commodity-producing regions in the world's No. 6 metallurgical coal exporter, which have balked at sharing more.
Echeverry said that up to 30 percent of the royalties will be saved, and the reform would gradually reduce the percentage that producing regions receive to 25 percent from 70 percent.
Once dismissed as a failing state mired in drug violence and guerrilla war, Colombia is enjoying a flood of foreign investment in its petroleum and mining sectors.
Ratings agencies Standard & Poor's and Moody's have given Colombia back an investment grade credit rating that was lost during a late 1990s economic crisis, and Bogota believes Fitch is waiting for the reforms passage to join its peers.
The royalty reform is the second of three major fiscal reforms to pass through Congress. On Wednesday, lawmakers sent through a bill amending the constitution to require the state to be fiscally sound. [ID:nN08261853]
Colombia's energy and mining sectors have been a key factor for boosting economic growth in the last few years, drawing in billions of dollars in foreign direct investment and making up around half of all exports from the Andean nation.
Infrastructure bottlenecks and deficiencies are seen as the main problem for the country as it seeks to nearly double coal production to nearly 150 million tonnes and produce more than 1 million barrels of oil per day over the next few years. (Reporting by Monica Garcia and Jack Kimball;editing by Sofina Mirza-Reid)
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