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NOPEC Bill In U.S. Congress Punctures Oil Cartel's Invincibility
- By The Financial District
- May 8, 2022
- 2 min read
A US Senate committee is expected to pass a bill that could open members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and its partners to antitrust lawsuits for orchestrating supply cuts that raise global crude prices.
Photo Insert: The bipartisan NOPEC bill would change US antitrust law to revoke the sovereign immunity that has long protected OPEC and its national oil companies from lawsuits.
The No Oil Producing and Exporting Cartels (NOPEC) bill intends to protect US consumers and businesses from engineered spikes in the cost of gasoline and heating oil, but some analysts warn that implementing it could also have some dangerous unintended consequences, Timothy Gardner reported for Reuters.
The bipartisan NOPEC bill would change US antitrust law to revoke the sovereign immunity that has long protected OPEC and its national oil companies from lawsuits. If signed into law, the US attorney general would gain the ability to sue the oil cartel or its members, such as Saudi Arabia, in federal court.
Other producers like Russia, which works with OPEC in a wider group known as OPEC+ to withhold output, could also be sued.
It is unclear exactly how a federal court could enforce judicial antitrust decisions against a foreign nation. But several attempts at NOPEC over more than two decades have worried OPEC's de facto leader, Saudi Arabia, leading Riyadh to lobby hard every time a version of the bill has come up.
The Senate Judiciary Committee is expected to pass the most recent version of the bill. To become law, the bill would then have to pass the full Senate and House and be signed by the president.
The White House has not indicated whether President Joe Biden supports the bill, and it is not clear whether the bill has enough support in Congress to get that far. Previous versions of the NOPEC bill have failed amid resistance by oil industry groups like the American Petroleum Institute (API).
