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To: Czechsinthemail who wrote (15436)	3/19/1998 1:05:00 AM
From: pz	Respond to of 95453

Wednesday March 18, 10:22 am Eastern Time Venezuela's Arrieta says will attend OPEC meeting CARACAS, March 18 (Reuters) - Venezuela's Energy and Mines Minister Erwin Arrieta said Wednesday he would accept an invitation to a meeting of OPEC ministers on March 30 in Vienna if other ministers also agreed to go. But he had no knowledge of any meeting planned for this weekend between OPEC oil producers and countries outside the cartel, as has been reported in other media. ''It has been suggested that OPEC ministers attend the monitoring committee meeting on March 30. The ministers I have talked to have agreed to go,'' Arrieta told reporters in the Miraflores presidential palace, adding that he would attend if others did too. Venezuela has said that it would cut oil production to shore up prices only as part of an alliance between OPEC and producers outside the cartel. But asked about whether any such meeting was planned this weekend with non-member producers such as Mexico, Norway and Oman, Arrieta said: ''I don't know where that information came from. If that was true I would be travelling now.'' Venezuelan Trade and Industry Minister said Tuesday that Venezuela was actively seeking agreement from all major oil producers on restraining output and expected a meeting ''soon''. Luis Giusti, president of state oil company Petroleos de Venezuela, said he was seeking to remove 1.5 to 2 million barrels per day (bpd) of world output from the market. The Organization for Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), which supplies about 40 percent of the world's oil, has been struggling to stem a price crash that has wiped 40 percent off the value of a barrel of oil in five months. Deep policy divisions have so far prevented any meeting of the oil producing group, let alone any agreement on production cuts. A planned monitoring committee meeting on March 16, to which all 11 ministers had been invited, was cancelled after Arrieta said he would not go and other ministers encountered internal problems preventing their attendance. Venezuela, which openly admits to be producing 30 percent above its 2.6 million barrel per day OPEC quota, has called for the group to abandon the leaky system of quotas. But OPEC heavyweight Saudi Arabia continues to support quotas and recently called on the busters to rein in output before it would consider taking any action. Saudi ruled out the possibility of unilateral action, arguing the policy had failed in the 1980s. Venezuela has opened its oilfields to private capital and plans to increase its output capacity by 50 percent in four years to six million bpd. It aims to become the fourth biggest oil producer in the world, from sixth place now, after Saudi Arabia, United States and Russia.