OIL MONOPOLY IN ORIENT

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXVIII, Issue 19945, 1 November 1934, Page 9

OIL MONOPOLY IN ORIENT

>*i»ANESE PLANS UNDER REVIEW

British Official Wireless

RUGBY. October 30.

Certain aspects of the Japanese petroleum industry law of March 27 have recently been the subject of representations made in Tokyo on behalf of the Governments of the United Kingdom, the United States and the Netherlands, the interests of whose nationals are liable to be adversely affected.

The main objects of the new' law appear to be the accumulation, in the interests of the Japanese Government and at the expense of the foreign oil companies, of vast reserves of oil and the encouragement of the oil refining industry in Japan. Extensive powers of control over the industry enable the Japanese Government to fix sales and prices, to determine the quotas of oil imports allotted annually to any given company, to force oil companies to expand their storage plant in case of necessity, and to set up refineries in Japan. The principal foreign oil interests concerned are required to incur heavy expenditure on the erection of additional storage tanks and to increase their oil stocks to about three times their present volume without receiving any security that they may be able to recoup themselves for this large

expenditure. Indeed, there is no guarantee that after the expenditure has been incurred the Japanese Government, by arbitrarily fixing sales and prices and limiting the quota of trade annually allotted to the companies, may not actually prevent them from so recouping themselves.