U.S. politicians set scene for lawsuit against oil producers

If NOPEC bill passes, the consequences would be enormous

VIENNA— U.S. politicians are at it again: punching OPEC.

The cartel has often been a bogeyman for U.S. politicians since the first oil crisis in 1973. Now OPEC is facing a renewed political assault in Washington, directly from U.S. President Donald Trump’s Twitter account, and quietly, but potentially more dangerously, from Congress.

In books and social media postings going back 30 years, Trump has repeatedly attacked the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), saying oil prices should be about $30 (U.S.) a barrel and arguing OPEC was stealing money from American citizens.

The president’s track record is important now because U.S. politicians have resurrected the so-called “No Oil Producing and Exporting Cartels Act,” or NOPEC, which proposes making the cartel subject to the Sherman antitrust law, used more than a century ago to break up the oil empire of John Rockefeller.

The bill was reintroduced in late May and cleared its first legislative hurdle last week when the House Judiciary Committee quickly sent it to floor deliberation. It would allow the U.S. government to sue OPEC for manipulating the energy market, potentially seeking billions of dollars in reparations.

For OPEC, which meets later this week in Vienna to discuss oil production, the bill is a fattail risk. The chances that it passes are small, but if it hap- pened, the consequences would be enormous. For some, the NOPEC bill stands in comparison with the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, or JASTA, which for the first time permitted lawsuits against Saudi Arabia over the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

“We can start by suing OPEC for violating antitrust laws.” DONALD TRUMP IN HIS 2011 BOOK

U.S. politicians have tried several times since 2000 to pass the NOPEC bill, but the White House opposed it — both George W. Bush and Barack Obama threatened to use their veto. The risk for OPEC is that Trump may break with his predecessors.

“Unlike past presidents, Trump is much more likely to sign it,” said Jason Bordoff, director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University and a former Obama administration oil official. Trump, before becoming president, didn’t just support the NOPEC bill, he was a cheerleader. “We can start by suing OPEC for violating antitrust laws,” he wrote in his 2011 book Time to Get Tough: Making America #1 Again about the problem of high oil prices.

“Currently, bringing a lawsuit against OPEC is difficult,” he wrote. “The way to fix this is to make sure that Congress passes and the president signs the No Oil Producing and Exporting Cartels Act.”

OPEC officials are worried. Hossein Kazempour Ardebili, Iran’s representative at OPEC, said the U.S. bill was an attempt to “blackmail” the group, adding that using antitrust law is “nonsense legally speaking, and we in OPEC are fighting it.”

In Washington, however, politicians facing rising pump prices in the months before midterm elections to decide which party controls Congress, are talking equally tough.

“OPEC is an international cartel whose members deliberately collude to limit crude oil production as a means to fixing prices, unfairly driving up the price of crude to satisfy the greed of oil producers,” Jerrold Nadler, a Democrat from New York, who’s co-sponsoring the legislation, told the Judiciary Committee last week.