OPEC tells US to stop harassment Saudi Gazette report JEDDAH – In a toughest language used so far in the ongoing blame game over the surging oil prices, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) asked US to stop harassing its members. “I want that, as the world's first power, they stop harassing OPEC countries,” OPEC Secretary General Abdallah El-Badri said in response to a question by Spanish newspaper El Pais that the US Congress wanted to take to court those OPEC countries which don't adjust their production to the needs of the market. “With the boycott of Libya, the boycott of Iran and the problem created in Iraq, there are five to six million barrels per day lacking on the market,” the Libyan official said. The soaring price of oil is not due to “the myth” of the lack of supplies as Western countries have said, but to speculation sparked by the subprime lending crisis in the United States, he said. “There is nobody queuing for oil, all demand is satisfied,” he added. “In reality, it's all quite simple to explain: the subprime crisis last summer in the United States had a bad effect on stock markets. Investors are looking for other (financial) products and commodities have become the most attractive for speculation,” he said. He countered the viewpoint that OPEC would not be interested in ending the price rises. “High prices mean more revenues for the governments of the consumer countries because the part that goes to taxes increases. More than 85% of our revenue goes back to the consumer countries; with that money we buy textiles, food, raw materials or industrial products from the US or Europe. “We don't accumulate greater wealth with this situation, it isn't true,” El-Badri told the newspaper in an interview published Wednesday. He, however, hoped that if the market goes back to behaving according to the relation between supply and demand, prices will drop. “If we leave the market to speculators, one day it is said that the price reaches $140, another that it will rise to $200, and the market goes into a panic. There are many who are getting rich with the myth that there is an oil shortage,” he said. The OPEC secretary general also criticized a warning Tuesday by the International Energy Agency of looming tensions over crude oil supply from 2010. “With the current high level of prices, we cannot say that there will be tension on the market,” he said. The industrialized world's energy watchdog stressed in a report on medium-term prospects for the oil market that growth in supply would outpace demand in the next few years before pressures built up again from 2010. The IEA based its assumptions in its 2008 Medium-Term Market Report on oil costing 110 dollars per barrel over the next five years to 2013, double the figure it used in last year's report.
