WASHINGTON, March 4--OPEC President Edmund Daukoru said on Friday that the global oil market is oversupplied by about 2 million barrels per day.
“The market is indeed well supplied with crude today,“ Daukoru told an audience at the National Press Club in Washington, ahead of next week’s meeting of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries.
According to Reuters, Daukoru’s view that the global market has plenty of crude oil differed with that of the United States, the world’s biggest oil consuming nation, which believes the market needs more oil.
US inventories of gasoline, which account for 40 percent of America’s daily oil demand, are the highest since June 1999 and Daukoru has said those big stocks will be a factor at next week’s OPEC meeting.
US Energy Secretary Sam Bodman said he does not know what OPEC ministers will decide about their production levels when the organization gathers in Vienna. However, Bodman said during his meeting on Wednesday with Daukoru that OPEC’s oil was needed based on high prices.
Even though crude prices have stayed high, Bodman said there are no signs the global economy is “suffering in any major way“ due to oil costs.
US oil for delivery in April settled on Friday at the New York Mercantile Exchange at $63.67 a barrel, up 24 cents, to near a three-week high as the unresolved dispute over Iran’s nuclear program and al-Qaeda threats to oil facilities in Iraq and Saudi Arabia kept traders on edge.
Daukoru, who is also Nigeria’s petroleum minister, said OPEC’s spare oil production capacity of 2 million barrels a day has not been able to counter oil price swings caused by market concerns about supply disruptions.
“We don’t believe that that (spare capacity) is having an impact, if you judge by the prices,“ he said.
Daukoru said if world oil prices persist above $60 a barrel, “we will definitely take that into account“ at the OPEC meeting on March 8.
He also said the organization will “most likely“ meet again after the March 8 meeting, but before another OPEC meeting planned in June, to review the organization’s oil output.

LONDON, March 4--France’s strategy of shielding some sectors from foreign takeovers is against European law and will not last, Reuters quoted German Chancellery Minister Thomas de Maiziere as saying on Friday.
Asked about the French government making a list of companies that must be protected, De Maiziere, whose job is to co-ordinate government work, said, “This is an old French tradition to make a special industry policy as we say, but this is against European policy law and this will not stand for a long time.“
France adopted a decree in December that designated 11 sectors as “strategic“, and required foreign investors who want to take significant stakes in firms in these industries to first seek approval from French authorities.
Last Saturday France announced plans for a state-engineered merger between Gaz de France and Suez, that Italy said was a protectionist move meant to thwart a potential rival joint bid for Suez by Italian utility Enel and French utility Veolia.
“We learnt a lesson through globalisation within the European process--you can build walls and hope that the wall will stand, and it won’t,“ De Maiziere said.
“So you have to anticipate these developments and not to build walls.
“This French solution can help until the next French election but it’s not a long-term strategy for the next few years.“
The European Commission gave France a two-week ultimatum on Friday to explain events that may have broken EU law leading up to the Gaz de France/Suez tie-up, marking a first step towards legal action.

NEW YORK, March 4--Google Inc chief executive officer Eric Schmidt said he sees no limit to the Internet search engine’s ability to increase advertising revenue, a bullish outlook that allayed investor concerns over slowing growth.Ê
According to World News website, the remarks at a meeting for analysts on Thursday in Mountain View, California, prompted a 3.2% rise in the shares as Schmidt soothed worries sparked earlier this week by comments from chief financial officer George Reyes.Ê
Schmidt said he was seeking to build Google into a US$100bil company.Ê
“We’re in the strongest position we’ve ever been in with search,“ he said.Ê
Google was improving the relevance of its online advertisements to boost sales and wanted to sell ads across all media, including radio and print, using online auctions, Schmidt said.
Competition from Microsoft Corp, which is developing its own search engine and ad systems, had not affected Google, he said.Ê
Schmidt, Reyes and co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page were more forthcoming on growth plans and competition than in the past, investors said.Ê
“They put a lot of the issues to rest, or they attacked them head on,“ said Walter Price of RCM Capital Management.
Analysts came to the meeting looking for more details about Google’s business and competition with Microsoft. Investors blamed Google’s reluctance to divulge information for its failure to anticipate a slowdown in earnings growth last quarter.Ê
Reyes addressed some analysts’ concerns, saying Google’s international growth was not slowing and the company was conservative with investments. He declined to give specific metrics analysts sought, including the number of Google advertisers and revenue per search.Ê
“If we were sharing those metrics with you, we would be sharing them with competitors,“ he said. Ê
Schmidt wants clients to increase spending by displaying ads for their entire product lines on Google, the most-used Web search engine, rather than a narrow selection. There was “tremendous room“ for improving the quality of Internet advertising, which would drive sales growth, he said.Ê
Reyes said Google had several new products that would give the company opportunities to bolster revenue growth.

LA PAZ, Spain,
March 4--Spain’s Repsol-YPF said Friday it would abide by a new Bolivian law forcing oil producers to give a 50 percent share to the government, adding it would comply with a probe into smuggling accusations, AFP said.
“We can’t do anything but go along,“ said Antoni Brufau, Repsol’s chief executive after meeting newly elected President Evo Morales.
“We must strengthen our cooperation with YPFB,“ Bolivia’s state-owned oil company, he said.
Brufau foresaw no changes in the company’s plans to invest 150 million dollars in a gas pipeline and a gas conversion plant for the domestic market.
“We have several exploration wells that need ... very large investments,“ he said, because they are drilled in the foothills of the Andes under great geological pressure.
He was not put off by the Morales government’s claim for an increased take of oil production.
“The president repeated his confidence in foreign investment,“ he said.
“When we are operating in a country, we must go hand-in-hand with the interests of that country,“ he said. “Bolivia is the epicenter of a very important region.“
Operating in Bolivia since 1977, Repsol controls 26 percent of the country’s gas reserves, the largest in South America outside of Venezuela.
Morales helped topple two of his predecessors in the presidency with street demonstrations largely over the exploitation of Bolivia’s natural gas reserves.
On his first visit to Bolivia, Brufau also said the company only asked for a fair hearing on charges brought by National Customs that it smuggled 230,400 barrels of oil worth 9.2 million dollars during 2004-2005.
“We have done nothing wrong,“ he said. “We have paid taxes religiously and we are convinced that this will all be cleared up.“

MOSCOW, March 4--Major aircraft manufacturer Boeing is looking to sell its next-generation 787 planes to two Russian airlines, a company official said Friday.
According to Ria Novosti, Craig Jones said the company was negotiating sales of 15 Boeing-787 Dreamliner planes to one airline and 2-3 planes to another, without disclosing their names.
Jones, Boeing’s vice president for sales in the former Soviet Union, also said the U.S. giant was negotiating sales of next-generation planes in other members of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).
The head of Boeing’s Russian operations, Sergey Kravchenko, previously said the Boeing-787 was a wide body passenger plane that could carry 220-280 passengers up to 10,500 miles, and fly for 18 hours without refueling.
“We estimate the market potential for this airplane at about $400 billion over the next 20 years,“ Kravchenko said.
Boeing has a long business history in Russia and has invested more than U.S $1 billion in cooperative programs with the Russian aerospace industry over the last 10 years. Those include space research, aircraft design, information technology, and the development of transpolar routes.
The company has a Technical Research Center and a Design Center in Moscow, where Russian aerospace experts collaborate with their counterparts from the United States.

OTTAWA, March 4--Prime Minister Stephen Harper and US President George W. Bush will be hosted in Cancun, Mexico by President Vicente Fox in late March to discuss security and trade, officials announced Friday.
Mexico’s visiting Foreign Minister Luis Ernesto Berdez Bautista said the meeting would be March 30 and 31, AFP reported.
“The three leaders concluded this meeting was necessary for the trilateral process of (economic) integration so that North America will be able to face competition from China and other Asian countries,“ he told reporters.
The North American Free Trade Agreement binds the three countries into a free-trade zone.
However, immigration and security are concerns across the thousand-mile land borders between the countries as trade increases.
“We’re going to have discussions around shared security concerns; border issues will obviously be part of the trilateral,“ said Canadian Foreign Minister Peter MacKay.
MacKay said the meeting would be “a continuation of what has been an extremely positive and very constructive relationship between these three countries ... the biggest economic and security partnership anywhere in the world.“
The United States and Canada enjoy the largest bilateral trade relationship in the world. The most recent trilateral meeting was in Waco, Texas, where then-prime minister Paul Martin and his counterparts agreed to close cooperation on border security, trade and energy.

WASHINGTON, March 4--The US budget deficit this year will hit $371 billion, up from an earlier estimate of $355 billion, the Congressional Budget Office estimated on Friday.
The likely increase was attributed mainly to additional funds requested by the Bush administration for the US military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, said the CBO, Congress’ nonpartisan budget analyst.
Reuters quoted CBO as saying that would put the fiscal 2006 budget deficit at 2.8 percent of gross domestic product, compared with the $318 billion deficit last year that was 2.6 percent of GDP.
For fiscal 2007, CBO said the Bush administration’s budget proposal would result in a deficit of $335 billion. But the agency said the Bush plan, now under consideration by the Senate and House of Representatives, only requested $50 billion to keep forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, which “may not be sufficient.“
“If the pace of those operations continued at about this year’s level, the deficit in 2007 would be in the vicinity of $355 billion, or 2.6 percent of GDP,“ CBO said in its preliminary review of the Bush budget.
The Bush administration has forecast a much higher fiscal 2007 budget deficit of $439 billion, which would be a record, and well above the $412 billion record set in 2004. Democrats in the House and Senate have said they thought the 2007 forecast was artificially high.
Congress typically writes an annual budget that varies significantly from the president’s budget request.
House and Senate budget panels are trying to write their versions of a fiscal 2007 budget blueprint this month.
Lawmakers soon will debate controversial legislation to raise government borrowing authority, possibly by $781 billion, because of rampant budget deficits.

All confirmed cases of H5N1 in Austria were found near Graz in the southern province of Styria.

VIENNA, Austria, March 4--Twenty-nine cases of the potentially deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu have now been found in Austria, the Austria Press Agency (APA) reported, after six new cases were confirmed Friday.
H5N1 was detected in five wild birds in the western province of Vorarlberg, but it is still not known whether it is the deadly strain, the province’s environment and agriculture representative, Erich Schwaerzler, told reporters.
He said the birds -- three ducks, a seagull and a grebe--were found in Bregenz and the nearby towns of Schwarzach and Hard on Lake Constance, which borders Switzerland and Germany.
Schwaerzer said samples of the dead birds would be sent to the EU reference laboratory in Weybridge, England, for further testing and safety measures were being taken around the lake.
“We have a contiguous protection zone on the lake and a surveillance zone in the rear,“ he said.
Until now, all confirmed cases of H5N1 in Austria were found near Graz in the southern province of Styria. The latest case was detected there Friday in a wild duck, according to officials.
The duck was found outside previously-established protection and surveillance zones and the health ministry was setting up safety measures starting at midnight on Saturday, APA reported.