YUKOS Assets Make Rosneft Industry Leader
Published May 5th, 2007
Rosneft became Russia’s largest oil producer after it bought the “Siberian†lot of YUKOS assets at auction yesterday. The state oil company paid $6.82 billion, that is, 5.5 percent over starting price, for the lot, which includes Tomskneft and the Angar Petrochemical Co. OOO Neft-Aktiv, a subsidiary of Rosneft, competed with OOO Yuniteks, a company with ownership unknown, for the lot. The director of Yuniteks, Alexander Basman, also heads companies registered at the same address as Gazprombank, but the bank denied that Yuniteks was acting in its interest. Gazprom had previously expressed interest in obtaining the lot. The final large lot of YUKOS property will go on the block on May 10.
The starting price for the lot was 166.34 billion rubles. That sum increased to 177.7 billion rubles in 36 bids, at which time Rosneft was declared the winner of the auction. In a press release issued on the outcome of the auction, Rosneft stated that its new assets would permit it to attain “a higher level of vertical integration.†It also became clear that Rosneft had surpassed LUKOIL as top producer with the greatest reserves in Russia. LUKOIL produced 90 million tins of oil in 2006, while Rosneft, with Tomskneft, can be expected to produce 92 million tons.
