State-owned Bahrain Petroleum Co (Bapco) is slowly ramping up its refinery, a company official said, after completing a maintenance shutdown that cut production by 70,000 barrels per day.

'The engineering work is finished. It's slowly ramping up,' said the official in the refinery's operations department, but declined to say how much it was currently producing.

Output fell to 190,000 barrels per day from a full capacity of 260,000 bpd during the outage, which the chief executive of Bapco described last month as the biggest in the firm's history.

Traders had speculated that violent protests in Bahrain were also to blame for lower production as staff were not reporting to work. Bapco denied having any problems due to absenteeism.-Reuters