Word: russian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...last wednesday of September, Russia's second largest oil company, Lukoil, hoisted the Stars and Stripes up a flagpole outside its Moscow headquarters to celebrate a landmark deal: with a $2 billion bid, the U.S. firm ConocoPhillips had just won an auction for the Russian government's 7.6% stake in the firm. The two companies promptly announced a strategic alliance to develop oil reserves in the Russian Arctic and potentially work together in Iraq. For Jim Mulva, Conoco's president and chief executive, the deal amounted to a coup, giving Conoco access to 8 billion bbl. of proven oil reserves...
...Many in Moscow expect the Yugansk auction to be just the beginning of a final carve-up of the company. Yukos is trying to stop the forced sale, which violates Russian statutes stipulating that non-core assets be sold first in the event of tax claims. The firm has launched legal proceedings against the Kremlin under an international energy charter and says it will sue the winner of the Dec. 19 bidding. "This has nothing to do with taxes and everything to do with expropriation," argues Robert Amsterdam, a Toronto-based lawyer for Khodorkovsky...
...their personal security. And the Yugansk auction is scheduled the day before a shareholder vote called to decide whether to file for bankruptcy protection; a principal reason Yukos hasn't already done so is that a majority of the board believes it would be impossible to find a Russian court willing to approve the petition. Indeed, the day before Conoco signed the Lukoil deal, the Moscow court where Khodorkovsky is on trial refused to allow former German Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, who's serving as an official European human-rights representative, to speak with him. The Yukos case...
...turmoil, Russia's vast untapped wealth of oil and gas has never looked more attractive. There are production challenges: many of the reserves are located in remote locations deep in Siberia or above the Arctic Circle. Russia's Minister for Natural Resources, Yuri Trutnev, has cautioned that extracting Russian oil will become increasingly difficult. Nonetheless, the Western oil companies are eager to export Russia's reserves, which are conservatively estimated at 70 billion bbl. - more than double those...
...copies, mostly in Britain; Starsky and Cox are in discussion with the BBC about developing a companion TV series. "Sextrology tells you everything you ever needed to know about your other half - but were afraid to ask," says BBC producer Sally Lisk-Lewis. The authors have also sold Russian, German and Spanish rights to the book. In France, even without a French translation, the Parisian style and design boutique Colette sells about 300 copies a month. "The laughter, the pleasure of discovering what people read is very visible and very immediate," says Colette spokesman Guillaume Salmon. The book's success...