The current high price of oil is artificial and the market is well supplied with crude, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said yesterday, pinning the blame on the sliding dollar.
“The rise in consumption is lower than the rise in production,” Ahmadinejad told a meeting in the city of Isfahan of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries’ (OPEC’s) fund for international development.
“The market is well supplied but prices are rising and this situation is artificial and imposed” by world powers.
Ahmadinejad, who is president of OPEC’s No. 2 producer, has repeatedly said that the current high price of oil is not based on fundamentals and driven largely by the weakness of the dollar.
“Certain hands, for political and economic ends, are controlling the price in an artificial manner,” he said.
Ahmadinejad also said “certain powers” were keeping an artificial oil price to “fund the costs of their wars and occupations and to justify investments to exploit new sources of energy at the bottom of the oceans, at the poles and elsewhere.”
In Asian trade yesterday, the main New York futures contract, light sweet crude for July delivery, dropped US$0.15 to US$134.46 per barrel after striking an intraday record of US$139.89 on the New York Mercantile Exchange.
Ahmadinejad made these remarks a week ahead of a meeting organized by OPEC kingpin Saudi Arabia in the Red Sea city of Jeddah to bring together major oil producers, including those outside OPEC, and consumers to discuss oil prices.
OPEC, which pumps some 40 percent of oil supplies and has been widely blamed for the five-fold rise in prices since 2003, insists the oil market is well supplied and that current prices do not reflect market fundamentals.
Ahmadinejad reiterated that the fall in the dollar was a prime cause of the world’s economic problems, saying it had affected “the world economy and in particular the economy of world energy exporters.”
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