PUERTO VALLARTA, Mexico -(Dow Jones)- Trade ministers from Group of 20 nations along with the head of the World Trade Organization said Friday that while Argentina's expropriation of the local unit of Spain's Repsol YPF SA (REP.MC) oil company was discussed among the officials, the issue doesn't fit within the framework of multilateral trade talks. "This issue is not a trade issue; this is an investment issue," said WTO Director-General Pascal Lamy at the end of a two-day meeting among G-20 trade and economic ministers in this resort city. As such, the expropriation of Repsol's Argentine unit YPF SA (YPF) is essentially a bilateral investment issue outside the purview of the WTO, he added. Mexican Economy Minister Bruno Ferrari, the host of the event, said there was discussion among the ministers about the YPF seizure earlier this week, but that it was not part of the official agenda and didn't distract ministers from the goal of the talks, which is to push forward economic development by lowering trade barriers and reducing protectionist tendencies. Ferrari said that the talks made significant advances toward identifying measures to promote trade, and were "an important injection of oxygen" into the current round of WTO talks, called the Doha round. Lamy said he would refrain from commenting on plans to bolster the resources of the International Monetary Fund to provide a greater safety net or "firewall" to limit the spread of Europe's debt crisis to more countries. "IMF issues are about IMF issues, and WTO issues are about WTO issues," he said. -By Laurence Iliff, Dow Jones Newswires; (+52-55) 5980-5184; laurence.iliff@dowjones.com
