AFP

European aircraft maker Airbus has cancelled its contract to deliver 19 A350 planes to Qatar Airways, a source close to the matter said Wednesday, amid a feud between the two aviation giants.

Airbus had already cancelled a multi-billion-dollar order of 50 planes from Qatar Airways, a major customer, earlier in the year, over the airline’s grounding of A350 aircraft.

Qatar Airways has been locked in a dispute with Airbus over degradation of the exterior fuselage surfaces on some of its A350 wide-body planes.

The issue has led the airline, one of the Gulf region’s “big three” carriers, to ground 23 of the aircraft and not accept further deliveries from the European firm until the problem is resolved.

Qatar Airways claimed damages from Airbus amounting to $200,000 per day, per plane out of action.

The order for the 19 aircraft was worth seven billion euros at catalogue prices, though airlines are usually charged less for large purchases.

Neither Airbus nor Qatar Airways immediately commented on the cancelled order.

– Court battle –

The airline and leading plane-maker have been fighting in the British courts for months over the paint problem.

Qatar Airways launched legal action against Airbus over the issue before the High Court in London in December, with Airbus vigorously defending the A350 against any suggestions the aircraft isn’t safe.

Qatar’s civil aviation authority grounded the planes judging the exposure of the metal mesh under the paint posed a safety risk.

But the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) found it posed no impact on the airworthiness of the aircraft.

In May, both sides said they hoped to reach a negotiated settlement.

Qatar Airways is demanding about $1 billion in damages over the peeling paintwork, which it says is a threat to the A350’s lightning conductor.

After the airline last year grounded part of its fleet of A350s, Airbus responded by cancelling an order worth more than $6 billion for 50 A321s from Qatar Airways.

Airbus said that a clause in the contract for the 50 A321 planes allowed its cancellation if Qatar Airways failed to fully honour any of its other contracts, which the airline did by refusing to take delivery of A350 aircraft.

In January, an Airbus spokesman told AFP that the aircraft maker had “terminated” the contract for 50 single-aisle A321neo aircraft, “in accordance with our rights”.

Qatar Airways chief executive Akbar Al Baker in June accused Airbus of acting like a “bully” over the dispute. 

“A manufacturer must never be allowed to use their market dominance to bully their long-standing customer,” he said at the International Air Transport Association annual general meeting in Doha.

Airbus chief Guillaume Faury, for his part, had said he was looking to talk to try to resolve the issue but acknowledged it was difficult.

Russian energy giant Gazprom said Wednesday that delivery of a turbine needed to keep gas flowing to Europe via the Nord Stream 1 pipeline was “impossible” due to sanctions on Moscow.

“Sanctions regimes in Canada, in the European Union and in Britain, as well as the inconsistencies in the current situation concerning the contractual obligations of (turbine maker) Siemens make the delivery impossible,” Gazprom said in a statement.

The statement risks further increasing concern in European countries who suspect Moscow is looking for an excuse to delay the turbine’s return to Russia and further reduce its gas deliveries.

Earlier on Wednesday, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz accused Russia of blocking the delivery of the key turbine to throttle gas supplies to Europe, as he raised the possibility of keeping nuclear plants going.

The continent’s biggest economy has been scrambling for energy sources to fill a gap left by a reduction in gas supplies from Moscow. 

The delayed return of the turbine from Canada, where the unit was being serviced, was behind an initial reduction in gas deliveries via the Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline in June, according to Gazprom.

Supplies via the energy link were further reduced to around 20 percent of capacity in late July, after Gazprom halted the operation of one of the last two operating turbines due to the “technical condition of the engine”.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Wednesday accused oil and gas companies of making “excessive” profits from the energy crisis sparked by the war in Ukraine, calling it “immoral.”

Guterres, releasing a UN report on the consequences of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, urged governments to tax the companies’ earnings.

“It is immoral for oil and gas companies to be making record profits from this energy crisis on the backs of the poorest people and communities and at a massive cost to the climate,” the UN chief told reporters.

“I urge all governments to tax these excessive profits and use the funds to support the most vulnerable people through these difficult times,” Guterres said.

“And I urge people everywhere to send a clear message to the fossil fuel industry and their financiers that this grotesque greed is punishing the poorest and most vulnerable people, while destroying our only common home, the planet,” he said.

Guterres said the combined profits of the largest energy companies in the first quarter of the year were nearly $100 billion.

With the rise in oil and gas prices, BP, ExxonMobil, Chevron and Shell also reported enormous profits in the second quarter.

The UN chief said that between now and the end of the year, 345 million people will be “acutely food insecure” or at “at a high risk of food insecurity” in 82 countries, an increase of 47 million due to the impact of the war in Ukraine.

Guterres warned that “many developing countries are drowning in debt, without access to finance, and struggling to recover from the Covid-19 pandemic and could go over the brink.”

“We are already seeing the warning signs of a wave of economic, social and political upheaval that would leave no country untouched,” he said.

The OPEC+ oil cartel agreed to a tiny increase in production Wednesday, an amount analysts say will disappoint US President Joe Biden after he personally lobbied Saudi leaders for help to tame soaring energy prices.

The cartel led by Saudi Arabia and Russia decided to raise production by 100,000 barrels per day for September, much lower than previous increases, according to a statement issued after a ministerial videoconference.

Oil prices seesawed following the announcement, rising before falling more than two percent in afternoon trading, with the main international contract, Brent, slipping under $100 per barrel. Traders were also reacting to data showing US crude inventories had unexpectedly risen last week.

“The smallest increase in OPEC+ history will do little to help the ongoing global energy crisis,” Edward Moya, analyst at OANDA trading platform, told AFP.

“The Biden administration will not be happy and this will be a setback in improving US-Saudi relations,” said Moya, who expects oil prices to remain stuck around $100.

With energy prices soaring following Russia’s war in Ukraine, Biden made a controversial trip to Saudi Arabia in July in part to convince the kingdom to loosen the production taps to stabilise the market and curb rampant inflation.

The US president met Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman despite his promise to make the kingdom a “pariah” in the wake of the 2018 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Biden said after his meetings with Saudi officials that he was “doing all I can” to increase the oil supply.

“A 100,000 barrel per day output hike is a pittance,” said Han Tan, chief market analyst at Exinity.

“It’s likely that the Biden administration will feel let down, considering its overtures to Saudi Arabia have yielded scant results, at least this time around,” Tan said.

– ‘Token gesture’ –

Saudi Arabia faced a balancing act between its old ally, Washington, and its OPEC+ partner Moscow, which has been hit by Western sanctions over the Ukraine invasion.

“The increase was a token gesture to appease US President Joe Biden,” said Stephen Brennock, analyst at PVM Energy.

The OPEC+ statement emphasised the “value and importance of maintaining consensus as essential to the cohesion” of the group, which includes the 13-member Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and 10 allies including Russia.

Russia’s deputy prime minister in charge of energy, Alexander Novak, said OPEC+ made a “cautious” decision due to “uncertainties in the market”.

He noted that Covid cases are rising.

“We see uncertainties associated with the disruption of transport and logistics chains due to restrictions being introduced, including for Russian oil and oil products,” Novak said.

Peter McNally, analyst at research firm Third Bridge, said OPEC+ was expected “to take more of a wait-and-see approach to adding material amounts of supply in the months ahead for several reasons”.

“The basis for the restraint are uncertainty around the future of Russian production and the cloudier outlook in demand,” he said, pointing to China’s Covid lockdowns and high fuel prices in the United States affecting demand.

– Western lobbying –

Biden is not the only Western leader to have lobbied bin Salman.

French President Emmanuel Macron hosted him last week in Paris, with Macron’s office saying the two leaders agreed to work “to ease the effects” of the Ukraine war.

Before announcing he would resign as British prime minister, Boris Johnson had also visited bin Salman in Riyadh in March to plead for higher oil production.

After cutting production in 2020 in response to falling prices during the Covid pandemic, OPEC+ agreed to raise its quotas last year as demand rebounded.

OPEC+ began to add around 400,000 barrels per day to the market last year, renewing the policy every month until June. It upped production by almost 650,000 bpd in July and August.

Its output is supposed to have returned to pre-Covid levels after cuts totalling 9.7 million bpd — but only on paper, as some members of the 23-nation group have struggled to meet their quotas.

A smallpox vaccine shown to protect against monkeypox has come under huge global demand, leading health authorities to warn against repeating the unequal distribution seen during the Covid pandemic.

While monkeypox had long been endemic in parts of West and Central Africa, since May there have been outbreaks across the world.

It has caused a scramble for doses of the only authorised vaccine against monkeypox worldwide, which is produced by Danish drug maker Bavarian Nordic. 

Here is the current state of play about the vaccine’s effectiveness and availability.

– 85% protection ‘approximate’ – 

Called MVA-BN and marketed under the name Jynneos in the United States and Imvanex in Europe, the vaccine was originally developed to fight smallpox.

Both viruses are part of the orthopoxvirus family.

Olivier Schwartz, head of the virus and immunity unit at France’s Pasteur Institute, said that the virus proteins for monkeypox and smallpox were 90-95 percent similar.

“So using a very similar vaccine to block it is a proven strategy,” he said.

While there is not yet large-scale data on the protection of Bavarian Nordic’s vaccine against monkeypox, previous research has suggested it is highly effective.

“The vaccine protection figure of 85 percent dates from field studies in the 1980s and 1990s in DR Congo and is quite approximate,” Schwartz said.

He added that studies on healthcare workers in 2018 and experiments on macaques had indicated the vaccine can be effective even after a patient has contracted monkeypox.

And people who had a smallpox vaccine dose before 1980 also have some immunity from monkeypox, though its extent and duration remain uncertain.

Schwartz said that studies during the 2000s found that around 30 percent of those vaccinated two decades earlier still had antibodies against smallpox.

He added that a booster dose would “reactivate cellular immunity, even after 20 to 40 years”.

But Yannick Simonin, a virologist at the University of Montpellier, warned that immunity “decreases over time and the persistence of neutralising antibodies against monkeypox has never been evaluated”.

– 350,000 doses to ‘undisclosed’ nation –

Bavarian Nordic partnered with the US health authorities in 2003 and has already delivered 30 million doses to the country.

Since monkeypox started spreading outside of Africa in May, the company has said it will deliver seven million more doses to the United States.

There is a total of around 16 million doses of the vaccine worldwide, mostly in bulk form, meaning it will be months before they are ready to use, according to the World Health Organization.

It has been difficult to determine the exact number of stocks held by countries, which have sometimes declined to reveal numbers — angering some non-governmental organisations and politicians.

Bavarian Nordic, which can produce up to 30 million doses a year, has also been reticent to reveal where it is sending them. 

On Wednesday the company announced it would supply 350,000 doses to an “undisclosed” country in the Asia-Pacific region.

Two other smallpox vaccines, ACAM2000 and LC16, are currently being studied to determine their effectiveness against monkeypox.

The United States currently has more than 100 million doses stockpiled of ACAM2000, but it is believed to cause more side effects than newer-generation vaccines.

Emergent BioSolutions, which makes ACAM2000, told AFP that it can currently produce more than 18 million doses a year — and could ramp up to 40 million annually if needed.

– ‘We want equity’ – 

Despite being the continent that has long battled monkeypox, Africa has yet to receive any vaccine doses.

There have been more than 3,000 confirmed monkeypox cases in Africa this year, while doctors say around 70 deaths have been linked to the disease.

The WHO has called on countries that do have vaccines to share, urging the world not to repeat the inequality of access to Covid vaccines between rich and poor nations.

Meg Doherty, director of the WHO’s global HIV, hepatitis and sexually transmitted infection programmes, said on Sunday that 35 countries have requested access to the monkeypox vaccine.

She told a meeting at the International AIDS Conference in Montreal there was “quite a possible risk” that it was rich countries requesting the doses.

“We want equity,” she added.