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To: ms.smartest.person who wrote (2228)	3/14/2007 11:31:08 AM
From: ms.smartest.person	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3198

UPDATE 2-Ecuador will review oil and mining deals - Correa Wed Mar 14, 2007 10:50 AM ET (Adds background) QUITO, March 14 (Reuters) - Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa said on Wednesday he would renegotiate mining and oil deals, undeterred from his radical leftist reforms by an increasingly fractious power battle with the volatile Andean state's Congress. The president has sent shivers down Wall Street with talk of renegotiating parts of his country's national debt and ending the lease on a major military air base used by the U.S. military. He has equated some oil deals with theft. "We are not going to make our country kneel in the face of foreign investment," he told a news conference in Quito. The U.S.-educated economist, a friend of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, kept up his tough rhetoric on foreign debt payments. "We do not exclude not paying. We will pay if the conditions of the country allow," he said. Correa has made the only payment on a foreign debt coupon that came due during his presidency but has left investors guessing over whether he will settle the next, due in May. He did not immediately specify whether he was eyeing any particular energy or mineral deals for renegotiation. Ecuador, South America's fifth largest oil producer, has crude output of around 530,000 barrels per day and foreign firms such as Petrobras <PETR4.SA> of Brazil are active there. Ecuador last year took over fields operated by Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum <OXY.N>, which has filed an arbitration claim of $1 billion. Correa is pushing ahead with his raft of reforms as he gains the upper hand in a fight with Congress, which has been instrumental in toppling three presidents in a decade. More than half of Ecuador's lawmakers have refused to accept an electoral court decision that fired them. They had sought to impede the highly popular president from holding a referendum to weaken the powers of Congress, widely perceived as corrupt. Changes proposed by the referendum are meant to lessen political influence in the judiciary and force lawmakers to live in the small constituencies they represent. The dispute with Congress had intermittently erupted into fistfights and scuffles with the police. The face-off is the biggest challenge to Correa since he took office in January. Ecuador has had eight presidents in a decade. Correa also reiterated his country's intention to return to the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, which it left in 1992. Several analysts have labeled this a political move, with a minor producer like Ecuador liable to be pinched by cartel quotas. © Reuters 2007. All rights reserved. yahoo.reuters.com