MEXICAN PRESSURE
How Mexico "is pressing foreign interests" is illustrated in a decree from Mexico City more than doubling all the taxes on oil. The big English company and the Oil Fields of Mexico Company, incorporated in New Jersey, but selling its oil to Lord Cowdray's concern, have each in their concessions the promise of immunity from export tax for fifty years. They and all other companies are now paying about five cents per barrel American gold as an export tax, and by national decree must from May 1, 1917, pay about eleven cents per barrel export tax, or nearly twenty per cent of the gross value of the crude oil as exported. The average price of exported oil at the coast I figure is about sixty cents per barrel. Many contracts are higher and many are lower. Many interior oil wells would be glad to sell at ten cents per barrel to anybody who would build a pipe line to them.
The decree also places an export tax of one cent a gallon on crude gasolene and of one half-cent a gallon on refined gasolene. Some of the late contracts for export, notably those of the Mexican Petroleum Company, have a proviso that the buyers under contract must pay any increased taxes.
