Freedom Watch Attorney Larry Klayman Serves Complaint on OPEC Oil Minister

In a bold stroke worthy of a process server’s academy award, Freedom Watch Chairman and Chief Legal Counsel Larry Klayman leapt out from a line of TV cameras Friday to serve a complaint on an OPEC oil minister.

The lawsuit filed on behalf of Freedom Watch in Southern District, Miami, Florida, charges OPEC with illegal price fixing, market division and collusion in having agreed to lower oil production worldwide by 1.5 million barrels a day, said Klayman, chairman and chief legal counsel.

Klayman said the cartel’s strategy is designed to raise oil prices globally and ultimately the cost of gasoline at pumps across America at a most unpropitious time with a depression looming.

The OPEC oil minister, Darlis Palacios Guerrero of Equador, was leaving the emergency meeting of OPEC ministers following their vote to cut production and was on his way to be interviewed by Bloomberg TV when Klayman surprised him by handing him a copy of the complaint, which the minister graciously accepted.

“Being Latin, he was most cordial and apparently thought I was handing him a gift,” Klayman said. “The gift I’m really hoping to give to OPEC ministers is a court injunction for perpetrating on the world a form of economic terrorism by their brazen use of oil as a weapon against our staggering economy,” he added.

Klayman, an attorney widely known for taking on powerful groups and individuals, including the administrations of Presidents Clinton and Bush on behalf of Judicial Watch, another public interest group he founded, was undeterred after having been thwarted earlier from serving the complaint on OPEC. On Thursday, he was ordered off OPEC property here by an OPEC official flanked by security and police offers. The official refused to give his name.

“Leave our property,” the OPEC representative told Klayman sternly when he had tried to serve the complaint at OPEC headquarters here.

“That’s the way these people operate,” Klayman said, “They continually display an arrogant disregard for the law.

On Wednesday, Klayman held a press conference outside the cartel’s quarters where he waved a gas pump nozzle at OPEC calling the nozzle a “smoking gun” that ties OPEC to the current financial disaster in the U.S. Their artificial run-up in oil prices earlier this year set the stage for the economic problems we’re now having, he said. “OPEC has bled billions out of our economy already and now wants to try to bleed us again, while our economy is so week and on the edge of collapse.”

The media event was planned and executed on behalf of Klayman’s Washington, DC-based Freedom Watch by the Boca Raton-based PR firm, TransMedia Group, ( www.transmediagroup.com ) whose chairman and CEO, along with VP Adrienne Mazzone, accompanied Klayman to Vienna.