OPEC and partners face steep challenge to reach oil cut deal
Vienna, Dec 7 : OPEC will meet with 10 partner countries, including Russia, on Friday to try to thrash out an agreement on oil production cuts, a day after the group's members failed to reach a deal.
The oil cartel had been expected to sign off on cuts to stem a plunge in oil prices at a meeting on Thursday, but it broke up without an accord.
"No, I am not confident" about the chances of a deal, Saudi oil minister Khalid Al-Falih told reporters after a long day of negotiations at OPEC's headquarters in Vienna.
However, OPEC and its non-cartel members -- who account for around half of global output -- agree on one thing: a glut on the market has led to oil prices falling by more than 30 per cent in the space of two months.
However, the major players among the oil giants all have their own reasons to look to others to act.
For Russia, which leads the non-member countries in the so-called OPEC+ alliance, "it's much more difficult to cut than for other countries, because of our climatic conditions," Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak said on Thursday in Saint Petersburg.
Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, has to bear in mind pressure from the US, after President Donald Trump demanded in a tweet on Wednesday that OPEC not boost prices.
In addition, the kingdom's diplomatic position has been weakened by the furore over the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Though al-Falih insisted that "we don't need permission from anyone to cut" production, the figure of a million barrels put forward by Saudi Arabia was lower than the reduction expected by the markets.
Iran, Saudi Arabia's geopolitical rival and OPEC's third-largest producer, suggested it was in favour of deeper cuts -- while asking to be exempted from them because of the effects of US sanctions targeting its oil sector.
The thorny question of exemptions, which will also be sought by Venezuela and Libya according to the Bloomberg news agency, could be crucial for Friday's talks.
The amount and the timetable of any cuts imposed by Russia will also be a key sticking point.
Iraqi oil minister Thamir Abbas Al Ghadhban said he was still "hopeful" an agreement could be reached during talks on Friday. However, markets displayed doubts with fresh falls in oil prices sparking a sell-off of stocks by investors.
The price of a barrel of Brent, the European benchmark, sank below the symbolic USD 60 mark because the reduction of around one million barrels floated by Saudi Arabia was below what markets had been expecting.
Analysts say that the details of any agreement will be key in determining what happens next to prices.
"If it's one million (barrels) excluding Iran, then it's in fact 1.2, 1.3, which should be supportive of price," Abhishek Deshpande, an oil analyst at JP Morgan, told AFP.
This would be because the markets would price in the drop in Iran's production expected due to sanctions.
"But if (the agreement) is including Iran, that's not enough," Deshpande added.
In June, OPEC and its partners agreed to allow for a boost in production by Saudi Arabia and Russia to compensate for the expected losses in production from Iran after the US dramatically withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal in May and vowed to re-impose sanctions.
However, the US then granted temporary waivers to eight allies to allow them to carry on importing Iranian oil, contributing to a plunge in oil prices which wiped out the gains seen since early 2017.
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After poll debacle, defeated MVA candidates to seek verification of EVM-VVPAT units
Mumbai(PTI): The Maha Vikas Aghadi candidates who faced defeat in the recent Maharashtra assembly polls have decided to seek verification of the EVM-Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trails (VVPATs) units in their segments, a leader of the opposition alliance said.
Many losing candidates of the opposition Shiv Sena (UBT) pointed fingers at the functioning of the Electronic Voting Machines (EVMs) during their interaction with party head Uddhav Thackeray on Tuesday.
Thackeray took stock of the lacklustre performance of his party at a meeting held at his residence in Mumbai.
The poll verdict last week saw the Mahayuti coalition, comprising the Shiv Sena, BJP, and NCP, retaining power with a massive mandate, pushing the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) to margins.
The Mahayuti won 230 seats and MVA only 46 in the 288-member House.
The Thackeray-led Sena (UBT) emerged as the largest party in the opposition camp by winning 20 seats, followed by Congress which bagged 16 constituencies, while the NCP (Sharadchandra Pawar) sits at the bottom with a tally of 10 seats.
Talking to PTI on Tuesday, Congress leader Arif Naseem Khan, who lost the election from Chandivali assembly constituency in Mumbai, said he held a discussion with Thackeray, who also said he has got complaints from his party workers that EVMs could have been tampered.
"We are getting complaints from different parts of the state expressing doubts over the results. In a democracy, complaints need to be verified and many of us, including myself, (who faced defeat) are in the process of applying for the verification," Khan said.
As per the Supreme Court's judgement on April 26 this year, the burnt memory/microcontroller in 5 per cent of the EVMs - the control unit, ballot unit and the VVPAT - per assembly constituency shall be checked and verified by a team of engineers from manufacturers of the EVMs, after the announcement of results, for any tampering or modification, he said.
A written request for this has to be made by candidates who are in the second or third position behind the highest polled candidate.
Such a request has to be made within seven days of declaration of the result, Khan said.
A candidate making the request will have to pay the expenses of Rs 41,000 which will be refunded in case the machine is found to be tampered with, he said.
The microcontroller is a one-time programmable chip embedded into the three units of EVM-Ballot Unit, Control Unit and the VVPAT - at the time of manufacturing, as per the SC.
A Sena (UBT) MLA from Mumbai has claimed there were discrepancies between the votes polled and the votes counted in the EVMs.
"Almost all candidates raised doubts over the EVMs," the legislator said.
