FTA: > The second highly effective method that Trump’s West Wing was able to use to stop Saudi Arabia from damaging the economic and political interests of the U.S. and its allies, was to threaten implementation of the ‘No Oil Producing or Exporting Cartels’ (NOPEC) bill. This ‘Damoclean Sword’ of legislation has a broad mandate, making it illegal to artificially cap oil (and gas) production or to set prices. Clearly, fixing oil pricing is the very reason why OPEC was established in 1960, and it is part of its written mandate. Saudi Arabia has been OPEC’s de facto leader from its creation that year, and Saudi Aramco is the prime vehicle through which Saudi Arabia’s production and pricing strategies (and those of OPEC) are implemented. Nobody from the Saudi side when the Aramco IPO was first announced seemed to have understood that there was a major legal issue in this context from both the U.S. and U.K. perspective – given stringent and rigorously enforced anti-trust (or anti-monopoly) regulations on both sides – and this was one of the key reasons why no serious investor in these countries wanted to invest in it. With Aramco being the key instrument used to manage the oil market by the Saudis, even though it is not directly involved in making the policy, the anti-trust legislation of the U.S. and U.K. can point to Aramco as being collusive in price-fixing through adjusting output to manage oil prices.