#4 - RW 274
US firms in talks to buy Yukos stake: Russian business chief
September 18, 2003
AFP

US companies are engaged in talks aimed at acquiring a 25-percent stake in the Russian oil giant YukosSibneft and could soon conclude a deal, the deputy head of Russia's top businessmen's association Igor Yurgens said Thursday.

Talks are under way "and we know that the companies are prepared to invest sums of the order of eight or nine billion dollars to acquire a 25-percent holding in YukosSibneft," Yurgens told reporters, as quoted by the RIA Novosti news agency.

Russia's leading oil producer Yukos, currently merging with its smaller rival Sibneft, on Tuesday rejected media reports that it was in talks to sell a stake in the new company to major US firms.

The Wall Street Journal earlier reported that US majors ExxonMobil and ChevronTexaco would make rival bids for a 25-percent stake in YukosSibneft and were each prepared to lay out an 11-billion-dollar investment.

"Of course the companies are denying it, because these are strategic talks," said Yurgens, vice-president of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs formed by the country's wealthiest businessmen and once known as the "oligarch" union.

Yukos denied there were any "written or verbal agreements to sell a substantial block of company shares" but admitted it was "conducting negotiations with the world's leading energy corporations about a wide range of possible joint business projects."

The largest single foreign investment in Russia to date is the 7.7 billion dollars paid by British oil giant BP earlier this year to form a joint venture with TNK.

Once the merger between the two Russian oil firms is completed, probably by the end of the year, the new company will be the world's fourth-largest private oil producer.

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