When OPEC Meets, Clarity May Be First Casualty

The official spokesman for the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries was asked by analysts, reporters and other observers at the recent OPEC conference here why the cartel had postponed a meeting until the next day.

“It indicates whatever you want it to indicate,” the spokesman, James Audu, replied.

Some guessed it meant that OPEC’s negotiations toward boosting oil prices were headed into the ditch. Others, reading different tea leaves, figured that progress was being made at more important levels and that a final accord was just around the bend.

The next morning, the Financial Times of London said OPEC was deadlocked and Iraq wouldn’t budge from its refusal to agree to an oil production quota. The other leading English-language financial newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, declared that OPEC had made progress and Iraq had budged.

Prices of oil for future delivery in London and New York went up in the morning and came back down in the afternoon, and some people in the financial markets got rich and others took a beating. It was a seemingly whimsical pattern that was to continue throughout the 10-day conference of OPEC ministers that ended last Saturday.

Blame it on a conspiratorial and manipulative OPEC, on the demands of daily journalism or on oil traders within OPEC trying to make a few bucks. For whatever reasons, it was a ritual performed regularly in the lobby and elevators and suites of the Inter-Continental Hotel.

Reports from the OPEC meeting, dispatched by analysts to their clients and by reporters to their newspapers back home, might have looked as if they resulted from news briefings, background papers and interviews with major players in the negotiations who wanted the world to know what was going on.

In fact, the 13 OPEC ministers were holed up in their hotel suites almost the whole time. All the meetings were closed. There were no briefings until the meeting finally ended at 5 a.m. on Dec. 20, and even then only sketchy information tending to gloss over the cartel’s remaining disputes was made available. With few exceptions, interviews granted to select reporters apparently yielded little reliable information.

OPEC’s attitude toward the 200 or so representatives of the Western press was reflected in the comment of a ranking delegate from a Persian Gulf nation who, sitting with three reporters in a restaurant, exclaimed: “You are privileged to be talking to me!”

Most of the news reports from OPEC resulted from almost comical, ambush-style confrontations when large groups of reporters spotted ministers or lesser OPEC figures walking through the hotel lobby, yelled questions at them and taped their utterances. Sometimes they required on-the-spot translation from French, Spanish or Arabic so that the British, American, Norwegian, German, Turkish, Japanese and French reporters could at least guess at their meaning.

Thus a garbled remark elicited from the deputy oil minister of Ecuador on Dec. 12 as he tried to get out of the hotel through a revolving door touched off a stampede to the press room by squads of reporters who concluded that an agreement to cut oil production had been reached. Though agreement was in fact more than a week away, oil prices shot up 60 cents a barrel on oil futures markets.

A press favorite until his optimism began to seem unwarranted was the minister from the United Arab Emirates, Mana Said Oteiba, who could be counted on for comments to the swarm of reporters as he swept through the lobby with his entourage each day.

“Tomorrow we are finishing,” he said on Dec. 12. The next day, he cautioned: “Let us cook it on a quiet fire.” A couple of days later, in a comment generally ignored by the reporters, Oteiba said: “We’ve completed cosmetic surgery, and now we are making the makeup.”

Riding the Elevators

To collect as many such remarks as possible, the Reuters news agency deployed seven reporters around the hotel. Along with other wire service reporters, they spent much of their time riding up and down in elevators, hoping that an unwitting oil minister would step aboard.

To be sure, they were rewarded from time to time with intelligible comments, including one of the few public remarks by reclusive Saudi Arabian minister Hisam Nazer, who said to a reporter from Agence France-Presse: “Don’t you get dizzy riding up and down like this?”

The most recent OPEC meeting was the first since the firing by King Fahd of longtime Saudi Oil Minister Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the man who created the public face of OPEC over the previous 24 years. As such, reporters who have covered the cartel for many years said they suddenly found themselves unable to gain access to people who would shed light on what was going on.

Even so, while many of the facts might have been wrong, the news accounts that careened from attitudes of high optimism to “a mood of despondency,” as the Financial Times gloomily reported on Dec. 18, appear in retrospect to have roughly coincided with swings in the tenor of the meetings themselves.

Profiting From Reporters

It has long been suspected that a few individuals within OPEC have tried to exploit the intense press interest in the cartel’s meetings to profit in the oil markets, using reporters to send out signals that would drive prices up or down. A journalist from an OPEC nation said the trading activity of one top delegate is an “open secret” back home.

“The dynamics of media coverage of OPEC and the OPEC decisions is a fascinating topic for study,” says Thomas R. Stauffer, a professor at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University, who claims that OPEC officials for years have managed to manipulate the press for either personal or organizational ends.

Taking all this in was an independent oilman from New Orleans, one of many in the oil industry attracted to the fringes of such OPEC events because they afford opportunities to buy and sell oil and conduct other business.

“At first I thought it was a crock, that it was not substantial reporting,” the oilman said. “But the more I watched it, I realized it isn’t the reporters’ fault. It’s the system forced on them by OPEC. They want it that way. OPEC wants mystery. They want an air of intrigue.”