June OPEC meet to focus on dialog, not market action: Kuwait

Reuters

Published May 12, 2016 12:22AM ET

June OPEC meet to focus on dialog, not market action: Kuwait

By Osamu Tsukimori

TOKYO (Reuters) - OPEC member Kuwait does not expect any coordinated action to be decided during the group's upcoming meeting in Vienna on June 2, the country's acting oil minister said on Thursday.

The "focus of the meeting will be to think and look around ... about what could be done further to stabilize the markets," Anas al-Saleh, told Reuters in Tokyo, Japan, on the sidelines of a Kuwait-Japan business seminar.

An earlier plan to agree on measures to stabilize soaring oil production that pulled down crude prices (LCOc1) by more than 70 percent between mid-2014 and early 2016 failed during producer talks in Qatar's capital Doha in April.

At the April meeting, OPEC rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran could not agree on deal terms, triggering criticism that the producers' cartel had lost its ability to act.

At the next official meeting of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), scheduled for June 2 in Austria's capital Vienna, al-Saleh said the focus would be on dialog, not market intervention.

"The expectation is to have more dialogue between OPEC members, and then from that we will be able to determine what would be the proper action going forward," he said.

Al-Saleh also said recent price increases from 12-year lows hit early in the year to around $47.50 per barrel for Brent crude futures were justified.

"Based on the decrease in production that has been shown in the last three weeks, I assume fundamentally the price represents the fall of production," he said.