OPEC and Russia-led non-OPEC oil producers are highly unlikely to create some kind of a formal joint organization for managing the oil market, due to the additional bureaucracy and to the risk of falling prey to a proposed U.S. legislation that could open the cartel and allies to antitrust lawsuits, Russia’s Energy Minister Alexander Novak said on Thursday. Although Russia and OPEC have been touting in the past the idea of “institutionalizing” their cooperation in the oil market by forming some kind of organization, Novak said the idea had now been discarded. “There is a consensus that there will be no such organisation. That’s because it requires additional bureaucratic brouhaha in relation to financing, cartel, with the U.S. side,” Reuters quoted Novak as saying at a briefing with reporters. It’s not only Russia that has been concerned with the possibility that the U.S. could pass this time around the […]