Chavez says backs Iran on currency basket for oil

PARIS (Reuters) - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said on Tuesday he supported Iran's suggestion that oil be sold in a basket of currencies rather than dollars, and the basket should include the euro, Japan's yen and China's yuan.

At a summit of Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) heads of state in Riyadh last weekend, Iran and Venezuela suggested the shift to other currencies, but they failed to win over the remaining member states.

The summit ended only with an agreement that OPEC states' finance ministers would meet before December 5 to discuss the sliding dollar's impact on their economies.

"The dollar has lost 40 percent of its value in three years, so we could use the euro," Chavez told a news conference in Paris, which he was visiting after a trip to Iran, where he met Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

"Yesterday in Tehran we had a chance to talk about it, creating together a sort of currency, a basket of currencies. So instead of carrying out transactions only in dollars, including in that basket the euro, the yen, the yuan and why not the (Venezuelan) bolivar?" he said, speaking through an interpreter.

"We are going to reinforce our currency and in future we are going to have a South American currency. That is one of the projects we have in mind," he added.

Chavez and Ahmadinejad are vocal critics of U.S. influence in the world, and have also been critical of the dollar recently.

On Monday, Chavez said: "The empire of the dollar is crashing," and Ahmadinejad on Sunday called the U.S. dollar a "worthless piece of paper".

The final statement issued at OPEC's weekend summit did not include any reference to the falling dollar, in an apparent victory for U.S.-allied moderates led by Saudi Arabia.

"We agree with the Iranian proposal ... to have a different base for oil transactions," Chavez told reporters in Paris.

(Reporting by Francois Murphy; Editing by Ron Askew)