The United Arab Emirates announced Tuesday that it will leave the oil cartel OPEC and its wider OPEC+ group effective May 1, a move rumored for some time as the Emirates chaffed under production restrictions and increasingly had frostier relations with neighboring Saudi Arabia.

The UAE had been a longtime member of OPEC, first through its emirate of Abu Dhabi in 1967 and later when the UAE became its own country in 1971.