Page 395 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

392 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

reason for urging the adoption by the United States of a pro-Arab position.
Where Faisal’s words did contain a suggestion of coercive measures of a kind to
worry ARAMCO was in their implication that a limitation might be placed
upon the level of oil production which ARAMCO would be permitted to reach
and sustain, if the Saudi monarch’s wishes were not met in the near future.
Having failed with their direct approach to the administration in Washing­

ton on Faisal’s behalf, ARAMCO and its parent companies embarked upon an
extensive campaign of propaganda and political lobbying to try to bring about a
change in American policy. The propriety of this campaign was sharply
questioned a year later by the Senate sub-committee referred to above, whose
counsel criticized the companies for acting as ‘instruments of the Saudi Arab

government and carrying out Saudi orders in terms of influencing U.S. foreign
policy’. The same accusation had been levelled at the companies on other
occasions, though in less public circumstances, and the ARAMCO partners
had each time shrugged it off. In their own eyes they saw little cause for
reproaches against them, and in any case they felt that they had bigger
problems to contend with than allegations of pro-Saudi bias.
These problems almost exclusively related, as noticed already, to production

targets and the retention of preferential access to the Saudi government’s share
of oil production in the future. Output from the Saudi fields had been raised in
1971 by 26 per cent over the previous year’s figure, and the same increase had
again been achieved in 1972. As seen earlier, ARAMCO was endeavouring to
achieve as great an increase, or even greater, in 1973. To reach this goal, and to

ensure preferential access to future participation crude, ARAMCO was pre­
pared, as has also been remarked already, to give way on prices. The extent to
which it gave way was revealed in the price settlement reached by the company
with Yamani in San Francisco on 17 September 1973, a settlement so generous
that it prompted suspicions that ARAMCO’s parent companies had actively
encouraged Yamani to bid up prices, especially for participation crude.
Whether there were solid grounds for these suspicions is uncertain. All that the

counsel to the Senate sub-committee on multinational corporations could
conclude after his investigations the following year was that ‘the documentary
record is ambiguous’; although, as he went on to remark rather drily, the
record would seem to indicate that they [the ARAMCO partners] are, indee ,

trading off price for preferential access to this Saudi crude’.
ARAMCO’s lavish settlement with the Saudis was to have a vital bearing
upon the new round of price negotiations which OPEC had been calling or
almost from the moment that the Geneva agreement of 1 June 1973 was S1&^ •
The recurring complaints of the cartel’s members about the insufficiency 0
revenues they were receiving were primarily directed against the pr° ts ma

by the oil companies from their ‘downstream’ activities, i.e. refining, is
*
cion and retailing. Whereas, as OPEC never tired ofpointing out, the P
metric ton of crude oil had only risen from $7 to $13 between 97