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Russian state champion snaps up final Yukos oil assets
By Stephen Boykewich
AFP
MOSCOW
Petroleumworld.com 05 11 07The sale of the last major Yukos oil assets on Thursday sounded the death knell for the former energy empire and boosted state-controlled Rosneft's newfound dominance of the Russian oil scene.
Rosneft bought production facility Samaraneftegaz and three Yukos oil refineries at a bankruptcy auction for 6.4 billion dollars (4.7 billion euros), securing its position as Russia's biggest oil company, which it won last week after acquiring other Yukos assets.
Unitex, a company linked by Russian media to state-controlled gas giant Gazprom, won a second auction for 537 Yukos petrol stations, beating British-Dutch oil giant Royal Dutch Shell and joint Russian-British oil firm TNK-BP.
The auctions mean that Yukos, the defunct energy empire once run by jailed oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, will fully repay the 27.5 billion dollars in debts to creditors, a spokesman for Yukos' court-appointed bankruptcy administrator said.
"Given that over 690 billion rubles (26.8 billion dollars) have been raised 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 after the first auction.
Even after the repayment, however, auctions will continue until all of Yukos' property has been liquidated, he said.
"The point of the tender process is to sell everything."
Rosneft won out in the first auction against Versar, an obscure group that has bid unsuccessfully for other Yukos assets, after bidding started at 5.9 billion dollars.
The filling stations went to Unitex in the second auction for 483 million dollars, up from a starting price of 299 million dollars.
The Samaraneftegaz facility was the last main production asset belonging to Yukos, which has been dismantled by Russian authorities in a series of tax fraud cases beginning in 2003.
Critics have seen Yukos' destruction as part of a Kremlin-orchestrated 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 massive oil unit Yuganskneftegaz in 2004 in a highly opaque deal.
The sale of Samaraneftegaz on Thursday was close to the market value for the assets, Alfa Bank energy analyst Konstantin Batunin said, making it "an especially striking contrast with Yuganskneftegaz."
Unlike in that sale, which happened for billions of dollars less than the unit's assessed value, "the Kremlin's strategy is to make these deals seem in the eyes of observers to be market-nature."
Rosneft overtook privately-owned Lukoil to become the biggest oil producer in Russia last week after the purchase of several major production assets from Yukos.
The company's Moscow headquarters will be auctioned off on Friday.
AFP 10 1347 GMT 05 07
Copyright© 2007 AFP. All Rights Reserved.
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