BY RUISHA QIAN
An oil dispute in Russia boiled over Wednesday, when authorities raided BP’s Moscow Office. The hostility stems from an ongoing dispute over oil development in the Arctic between BP and its Russian billionaire partners.
Before it fell apart, the partnership went by the name TNK-BP. RT has the details:
“Police officers acting on an arbitration court order searched BP’s office for incriminating documents, following a lawsuit filed by BP’s partners for $3 billion worth of damage caused by a collapse of a deal with Russian’s oil company Rosneft.”
In January, Britain’s BP and Russia’s Rosneft (prounouncer)agreed on a 16 billion dollar partnership in the Arctic. After the deal’s collapse, the Russian billionaires sued for damages.
On RT, Investcafe analyst, Grigory Birg, explains why:
“BP tried to go around its Russian partners to develop one of world’s largest untapped energy reserves lying in the Arctic shelve. This of course angered Russian shareholders and they filed the case. So this search was just one of the steps of the ongoing trial.”
But analyst says it’s BP, not the Russian oil companies, who is the victim here. CNN talks about BP’s angry press release over the incident.
“You know sometimes companies say we don’t want to comment, we don’t know all the details of this office far away. But BP put out this statement pretty quickly … and it’s very angry, lets put it that way, with the Russian authorities. BP says you know, look this office is our exploration office in moscow, the lawsuit is about TNK BP, about the Rosneft deal that didn’t happen.”
The New York Times suggests the timing of the raid might not be coincidence; instead, it could be a signal for BP’s rival Exxon, who just yesterday struck a deal with Russia.
“A day after Exxon, the American oil giant, struck a strategic alliance with Russia’s state-owned oil company, police agents in Moscow staged a vivid reminder of what can happen to foreign petroleum partners that get on bad terms with the government.”
If Russia was trying to muscle BP, it seems it didn’t have much of an effect. News of the raid didn’t barely scrateched BP’s stocks. The Financial Times reports:
“News of the raid had little impact on BP’s shares which closed up 0.2 per cent to 398.39p in London. The Russian stock market on Wednesday also largely shrugged off the news and rose, with the Micex index closing up 2.4 per cent.”
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