RIYADH, March 19: The government has conceded that Kuwait is in touch with the United States over payment for fuel supplies. Energy minister Sheikh Ahmad Fahd al Sabah said in a newspaper interview that the talks were ‘not over the issue of debt but on ways to find a payment mechanism for future supplies’. Earlier, the London based Al Hayat newspaper, quoting Kuwaiti MP Nasser al Sane, said the United States and Kuwait were locked in a dispute over Washington’s failure to pay hundreds of millions of dollars for fuel supplies for its army. Sheikh Fahd denied the allies were in dispute on the issue.

According to Al Hayat, Kuwait was asking the United States to pay some 500 million dollars for fuel it supplied to the US army after the occupation of Iraq, but Washington has said it would pay less than one-third of the amount.

Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld reportedly responded with a tough-worded letter, saying that Washington had liberated the emirate from Iraqi occupation in 1991 and as it enjoys a fiscal surplus, there was no need to demand the payment.