UPDATE 1-Perenco to halt Ecuador oil output in tax fight

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By Eduardo Garcia

QUITO, July 15 (Reuters) - French oil company Perenco will temporarily halt operations in Ecuador from Thursday over a fight with the government concerning taxes, a top company executive told Reuters on Wednesday.

Ecuador has seized the bulk of Perenco's production since March in a bid to collect more than $350 million it says the company owes in windfall taxes.

"The suspension will start tomorrow, Thursday 16, at midday Quito time (1700 GMT)," the company's Latin America manager Rodrigo Marquez said in a telephone interview.

"It's going to be something temporary because we are going to keep our personnel there, in the hope that the government backtracks," Marquez said.

Ecuadorean oil and mines minister Germanico Pinto warned on Tuesday that if Perenco decides to halt production it will "have to face the consequences," but he did not specify what kind of measures the government could take against the company.

Ecuador is trying to sell some 2 million barrels of oil confiscated from Perenco, and the only bidder so far has been Petroecuador, Ecuador's state oil company.

Perenco extracts 22,000 barrels of oil per day from Ecuador's Amazon jungle, or around 4.5 percent of the country's total output, which amounted to 486,000 barrels per day in May.