Conspiracy Theory Involving Crude Oil

And here's one conspiracy theory involving crude oil.

Posted recently on Naked Capitalism: Oil Companies Storing Oil on Tankers, Waiting for Higher Prices

• I am not making this up, and this is NOT Iran, which has stored oil on tankers due to a lack of sufficient refining capacity for its heavy, nasty crude.
  
  Even though the long-term outlook for oil is for higher prices, holding oil already produced off the market is no panacea. But the intent is not to buffer declines, since the amount contracted to be stored at sea is still only a fraction of daily world demand. This is a a speculative move by the oil companies themselves rather than an effort to shift the supply/demand equation (although the oil companies may hope that the information value of their move, that they are confident enough that prices are "too low" to spend money on storage, may help put a floor under oil prices). And due to the falloff in shipping rates generally, tankers can be contracted at very low prices, making this a cheaper gamble than it would ordinarily be.
  
  We have noted before that above-ground oil storage is costly and not as tidy as one would imagine, so in cases like this, oil is not as easily stored as one might imagine.
  
  From Reuters (hat tip reader Michael)