Haitham Al Ghais

Secretary General

Secretary General of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries since August 2022, and a Kuwaiti national. He spent most of his career at Kuwait Petroleum Corporation, where he served as Deputy Managing Director for International Marketing and handled the marketing of Kuwaiti crude in Asian and European markets. He was Kuwait’s Governor to OPEC between 2017 and 2021, took part in the Joint Ministerial Monitoring Committee that tracks OPEC+ compliance with production quotas, and chaired the organisation’s Board of Governors. He succeeded Mohammad Barkindo as Secretary General, taking office at a time when the organisation was managing the OPEC+ agreement amid sharp price volatility and widely diverging readings of global demand.