United Arab Emirates says it will leave OPEC effective May 1

An illustration image of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) / Reuters-YonhapDUBAI, United Arab Emirates — The United Arab Emirates (UAE) announced Tuesday that it will leave the oil cartel OPEC and its wider OPEC+ group effective May 1, a move rumored for some time as the Emirates chaffed under production restrictions and increasingly had frostier relations with neighboring Saudi Arabia.The UAE had been a longtime member of OPEC, first through its emirate of Abu Dhabi in 1967 and later when the UAE became its own country in 1971.But the UAE has been increasingly trying to leverage its own foreign policy in the Middle East that has contradicted some positions of Riyadh over time — particularly as Saudi Arabia began to directly challenge the Emirates in trying to…

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