SAUDI ARABIA - Profile - Suleiman Jasser Al Herbish.

Saudi Arabia's Governor in OPEC, Herbish has served as assistant deputy oil minister for years under both Hisham Nazer and Ali Naimi. Now he is Saudi Arabia's candidate for the key post of OPEC secretary general, with efforts to get him chosen for the job having begun since May 1999 when secretary general Rilwanu Lukman of Nigeria was made special advisor to newly elected Nigerian President Obasanjo.

In the contest, Herbish faced Iran's OPEC Governor Hossein Kazempour Ardebili as a rival candidate for secretary general. Just before OPEC's ministerial conference was opened in Vienna on Sept. 22, Iraq put the candidacy of its former ambassador to Unesco and chief oil negotiator with the UN Dr. Abdil Amir Al Anbari (one of the speakers at the 12th Annual APS Conference held in Beirut on Oct. 4-6, 1999).

As the oil ministers in Vienna failed to agree on a new secretary general, with Algerian Energy Minister and current OPEC President Youcef Yousfi having presented himself as a compromise candidate, Lukman was asked to continue holding the post for an interim period. But he handed over the running of OPEC's secretariat to Shokri Ghanem, of Libya, while Lukman supervised activities from the Nigerian capital of Abuja.

For their part, Saudi Arabia and Iran agreed to jointly designate Herbish and Ardebili as their successive - "back-to-back" - candidates for the next two three-year terms of OPEC secretary general. That will be done during the next OPEC ministerial conference to be held in Caracas in March 2000. The only previous time a Saudi national held the post of OPEC secretary general was in 1967, when Mohammed Joukhdar assumed that role only for one year.

The Saudi Arabian Mining Co. (Maadin), created as part of the petroleum and mineral resources ministry, was approved by a royal decree in April 1997 to be in charge of developing Saudi Arabia's mines other than those of hydrocarbons and to replace Petromin.

Maadin has since taking over all of Petromin's interests in the mining sector. These have included the Saudi Company for Precious Metals, a 50-50 venture with the Saudi-Swedish firm Boliden Mineral which runs a gold mine at Sukhaybarat. Maadin, based in Riyadh, will be fully or partly offered for public subscription once it has become commercially viable.

Petromin, created in the 1960s, was once set to become an empire bigger than Aramco as its former governor Abdel Hady Taher had wanted. By late 1988, two years after Taher was dismissed, Petromin had become a "messy organisation". In 1989 Samarec was created to take over Petromin's oil business. But Samarec was absorbed by Saudi Aramco in 1993, after having proved to be inefficient.