Kuwait Petroleum Corporation's chief executive said on Tuesday that Iran was holding the world economy hostage, calling claims it was only attacking US infrastructure in the Gulf untrue.
“This is an attack against not only the Gulf, but it is an attack that is holding the world economy hostage,” Sheikh Nawaf Al Sabah said during CERAWeek by S&P Global.
Mr Al Sabah addressed the crowd in Houston, Texas, virtually, as he was unable to travel because of the war in the Middle East.
Iran has struck Kuwait’s largest oil refinery, as well as the Shah gasfield in the UAE and Qatar’s Ras Laffan industrial hub during its sweeping attacks on energy infrastructure across the Middle East. Iran has argued the strikes are in retaliation for co-ordinated US-Israeli strikes against Tehran on February 28, in which Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was killed.
“We are outraged by this attack on us,” Mr Al Sabah said. In a defiant message, Mr Al Sabah said the Iranian attacks on Kuwaiti infrastructure were “unprovoked” and “illegal by any measure” and denied Tehran's claims that they were against US sites in the region.
“There is no military or even logical reason for these types of attacks. Our refineries have been attacked, and yet these refineries are Kuwaiti-owned,” he said.
“There's no joint venture in any of these. So this all points to a lie, what Iran has been claiming, that they are attacking and they are limiting their attacks only to American infrastructure in the region.”
Roughly 20 million barrels of oil per day, along with more than one third of the world's fertiliser and almost a quarter of the total petrochemicals, transit through the strait.
Mr Al Sabah's remarks broadly echoed those made on Monday by Dr Sultan Al Jaber, Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology and managing director and group chief executive of Adnoc, who said Iran's attacks on Gulf energy sites were an act of “economic terrorism”.
Mr Al Sabah said: "We are defiant because we will not succumb – we never have in the past, and we're not about to now."
Iran's attacks on Kuwait have led to comparisons with Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990. The invasion and subsequent occupation had severe economic consequences for Kuwait. Mr Al Sabah said if the Iran war were to end today, the country would be able to bring back production "relatively quickly" relative to the 1990-1991 occupation.
"It will still take us and everybody else in the Gulf a few months to reach our full production capacity," he said.
About 10,000 energy executives and government officials from more than 80 countries were expected in Houston this week for the annual CERAWeek conference.
Dr Al Jaber also delivered his speech online due to travel disruptions in the region, while Aramco chief executive Amin Nasser's appearance was cancelled altogether.
