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Rosneft buys key Yukos asset for 6.4 billion dollars
AFP
MOSCOW
Petroleumworld.com 05 10 07State-run Rosneft bought a key production facility and refineries belonging to bankrupt oil group Yukos on Thursday for 6.4 billion dollars in a deal that further boosts Russia's biggest oil major.
The auction means that Yukos, the defunct energy empire once run by jailed oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, will fully repay 26.8 billion dollars in debts to creditors, a spokesman for Yukos' court-appointed administrator said.
"Given that they raised over 690 billion rubles (26.8 billion dollars) at auctions so far... we can say with confidence that all of the debt owed to creditors will be completely paid back," Nikolai Lashkevich said.
Rosneft was bidding against Versar, a previously unknown group, and the starting price for the sale was 5.9 billion dollars, organisers said ahead of the sale at Yukos headquarters in Moscow.
The Samaraneftegaz facility was the last main asset auction belonging to Yukos, which has been dismantled by Russian authorities since 2003 in a series of tax fraud inquiries.
Critics have seen the fate of Yukos as a Kremlin-controlled campaign to win back energy assets for state companies and block the politically ambitious Khodorkvosky, who is now serving an eight-year prison sentence in Siberia.
Rosneft, whose chairman Igor Sechin is also the deputy head of the Kremlin
administration, has been the main beneficiary of the Yukos auctions, starting with the purchase of Yuganskneftegaz in 2004 in a highly opaque deal.
After the purchase of several major production assets from Yukos last week, Rosneft overtook privately-owned Lukoil to become the biggest oil producer in Russia.
AFP 10 0746 GMT 05 07
Copyright© 2007 AFP. All Rights Reserved.
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