Question of Security : Oil Cartel’s Faith in Geneva Is Shaken by Police Flap

The oil sheiks’ sporadic love affair with this historic city is on the rocks again, this time apparently threatened by local police politics, the firing of Saudi Arabia’s longtime oil minister and general hard times in the Oil Patch.

The full truth of the matter is as slippery as a barrel of Persian Gulf crude, but this much is known: The ministers of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries meeting here this week adopted a resolution to hold most of their meetings in Vienna from now on.

The oil cartel has held its ministerial sessions in more than two-dozen cities the world over since its founding in 1961, with Vienna, its headquarters, the most frequent choice. But Geneva was OPEC’s original headquarters, and in recent years the cartel has rediscovered the city. Eleven of the last 15 ministerial conferences have been held here.

The official rationale for the change is to save money. With its member nations in a pinch due to the collapse in oil prices, officials of OPEC say it’s only prudent to trim costs by meeting at the cartel’s headquarters. That way they don’t have to ship a bunch of files and typewriters from Vienna to Geneva and get hotel rooms for the 20 or so OPEC staff members who attend these meetings.

But the plot is said to be richer than that. Local officials believe that OPEC was also miffed when Geneva police officials declared that they wouldn’t provide their usual heavy security for the OPEC ministers after this Friday because they wanted some time off for Christmas.

Local Joke

Given all the intrigue that seems endemic to Geneva, including the laundering of money through Swiss banks in the U.S.-Iran arms-peddling scandal, there’s a joke going around that the police officers standing all over the Inter-Continental Hotel with machine guns and lesser weapons are just trying to sell them to the Iranian oil minister.

But in fact, terrorism remains a major concern to the OPEC members from the Middle East. Police, most in plain clothes, are camped at the hotel doorways, outside the meeting rooms and on every guest-room floor.

Indeed, since terrorist attacks against OPEC in Vienna in the mid-1970s, Geneva’s security has been one of its chief attractions.

“It was already in the works that they would spend more time in Vienna, but this police thing was the final stroke,” a local official said.

The police flap, mired in local union politics, has touched off a local civic debate because OPEC spends a lot of money here and attracts hundreds of expense account followers as well. The Inter-Continental itself, which claims to have hosted 65 heads of state in its 24 years, has been taken over by OPEC for more than 50 days this year and gets nearly one-fourth of its revenue from the oil meetings.

The hotel goes to considerable lengths to please the oil ministers, even offering Arabic-language movies on cassettes for rent.

Disagreement Resolved

By late Tuesday, it wasn’t clear how serious the police threat was to the continuation of the current OPEC meeting. Hotel manager Herbert A. Schott said the disagreement had been resolved and that “if they need security after Friday, they will have it.”

But in the end, some think the oil ministers’ departure from Geneva might be the inevitable reflection of changes at OPEC itself--specifically, the recent firing of Sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani as oil minister of Saudi Arabia. His replacement, former Planning Minister Hisam Nazer, reportedly urged the move to Vienna.

A cosmopolitan and sophisticated city that serves as a crossroads for many of the world’s big shots, Geneva is particularly well suited to charismatic world citizen Yamani. In fact, he has extensive business interests here and is rumored to be planning a visit to his home on Lake Geneva toward the end of December.

“Yamani was the one who liked Geneva, and he is well liked here,” said a longtime local resident who has routine contact with the OPEC leaders. “He has a lovely home on the French side of the lake and an apartment in town. Geneva is his place, and the new guy naturally wants to go somewhere else.”

As for the location of future OPEC meetings, it probably doesn’t mean a thing that the “new guy”--UCLA graduate Nazer--maintains a vacation home in Los Angeles.