Word: bp
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...companies are piling in. In addition to the Conoco deal, Britain's BP is investing a whopping $7 billion in a joint venture that controls huge fields in western Siberia, and in September, France's Total agreed to pay $1 billion for a 25% stake in Novatek, Russia's largest private gas producer. Many other companies, including ChevronTexaco, PetroCanada and Norway's Statoil, are trying to get a foothold. All three recently signed preliminary agreements to work with state-controlled Gazprom, an oil-and-gas behemoth in which German power company E.On holds a 6% stake. And there is widespread...
...oligarch incurred the wrath of the Kremlin because he got too big for his britches--not a concerted attack on the oil sector as a whole. Few top executives will talk about Yukos publicly, and most oil companies won't comment on their Russian investment strategies. But John Browne, BP's chairman, has defended his company's deal. "At present, I would say--and I believe this will continue--that there has been no effect" on BP's Russian venture from Yukos, he said earlier this year. That ties in with a common theory in Moscow that Khodorkovsky ran afoul...
...limitations on the private sector, particularly foreign companies. Under the terms of the Conoco deal, for example, the American company can raise its stake in Lukoil--but only to a ceiling of 20%. That's less than the 25% it needs to be able to block strategic company decisions. BP, by contrast, whose contract was signed eight months before Khodorkovsky's arrest, has a 50% share in its Russian joint venture. (The company's Russian minority shareholders are howling because BP uses a complicated transfer-pricing method that allows the parent company, instead of subsidiaries, to book the lion...
...experience of BP suggests that Yukos' success with modern production techniques wasn't a fluke. After a year of operations, BP recently gave the first detailed report about its joint venture, called TNK BP. The surprises are all good: it has revised the level of reserves upward, production growth is well above the expected 7% annual increase, and the firm has decided to double its capital spending to make more of the opportunities it is finding. In the Soviet era, BP officials explain, oil wells were developed in a cookie-cutter approach that didn't customize extraction techniques...
...BP has also run into the difficulties foreign companies typically face in Russia, from a volatile economy to unreliable partners. The company's first foray into the Russian market, in 1997, ended badly after a firm in which it took a 10% stake went bankrupt. At the time, oil was near $10 per bbl., the Russian economy was sliding into crisis, and BP found its stake wasn't big enough to influence management of the company, called Sidanco. BP also ended up at loggerheads with other Russian shareholders at Sidanco, members of the private Alfa investment group headed by billionaire...