The spokesman of the International Energy Agency (IEA) said that he was worried about the Venezuelan decision to stop selling oil to the US company Exxon Mobil, and noted that the agency was closely following the situation, reported the news agency, Reuters.

"We are concerned about the physical side of the event and we are carefully following its development," told the executive director of the IEA, Nobuo Tanaka, to the journalists.

The IEA reduced their calculations of global consumption of oil for this year, mainly in developed countries, due to the economic slowdown anticipated by the International Monetary Fund. In its monthly report, the AIE cut by 200,000 barrels per day their forecast for global consumption in 2008, which therefore remained in 87.6 million barrels per day.