[R-P] Rusia enfrenta a la Shell y a British Petroleum

[Nestor Gorojovsky]

Gentileza de la A-list

[No tengo tiempo para traducir, lo lamento.  Pero el núcleo de estas 
noticias es que Rusia, a través de Gazprom, está recuperando la 
propiedad de sus hidrocarburos después de la ola entreguista de 
Yeltsin (=Menem).  Indudablemente, Putin representa algo muy 
distinto.  

En este momento, son la Shell y la British Petroleum las que 
descubren que si no empieza a respetar al dueño de casa pueden 
quedarse sin las concesiones del tiempo del oprobio.  Un mecanismo 
para ello, en el caso Shell, es retirarle la habilitación por causas 
ambientales.  En la Argentina, sería sencillísimo liquidar todas las 
concesiones con ese argumento:  desde que se entregó el petróleo a 
los pulpos imperialistas, los "accidentes" ambientales son cosa de 
todos los días.

Cito de uno de los artículos: "La única pregunta ayer era si la línea 
dura del Kremlin eran malas noticias serias para la Shell o si se 
trata simplemente de un truco en la negociación, para garantizar en 
el contrato mejores condiciones para el gobierno y el pueblo rusos. 
De lo que no cabe duda alguna es de que, tras haber dado la 
bienvenida con brazos abiertos a la inversión extranjera en sus 
hidrocarburos, ahora el Kremlin se decidió a ejercer más influencia -
y aún control directo- sobre sus vastos recursos naturales."]

Russian bear ready to maul Western oil majors 
By Andrew Osborn in Moscow and Michael Harrison in London 
The Independent: 20 September 2006

The biggest Western investment in Russia to date - the $20bn (£10bn) 
Sakhalin-2 oil and gas development off the Siberian coast - was 
plunged into further turmoil yesterday after the Kremlin said talks 
over Gazprom taking a stake in the project had stalled.

The bombshell came as Shell, which is the lead company in the project 
with a 55 per cent shareholding, faced the very real prospect of 
being stripped of a key environmental licence for its development of 
Sakhalin-2, throwing the future of the entire project into 
uncertainty.

Shell has been in talks with Gazprom for more than a year about 
swapping 25 per cent of its interest in Sakhalin-2 for a half share 
in one of the state-owned Russian gas company's onshore fields in 
central Siberia. But yesterday, Gazprom said the talks with Shell 
over a possible asset swap were off.

No ifs or buts, just a closed door. The company said there had been 
"no movement in the past year" and signalled it was no longer worth 
talking.

Sakhalin, a starkly beautiful island in Russia's far east that is 
closer to Tokyo than Moscow, is famous for its dearth of good news. 
Ask a Russian and they will tell you - its crime rate is higher than 
elsewhere in Russia, it used to be a sprawling Tsarist penal colony, 
and in 1995 an earthquake killed about 2,000 people.

The question that was being asked yesterday was whether the Kremlin's 
tough line spelt seriously bad news for Shell or whether it was 
simply a negotiating ploy to extract better terms from the deal for 
the Russian government and its people.

For there is no doubt that, having welcomed foreign investment into 
its oil and gas industry with open arms, the Kremlin is now keen to 
exercise more influence, if not direct control over its vast natural 
resources.

At the same time as Shell is under pressure to cede a bigger share of 
Sakhalin-2 to Gazprom, the country's monopoly gas supplier is also 
said to be eyeing the 50 per cent stake in TNK-BP, which is owned by 
a group of private Russian investors. The TNK-BP stake, which is in 
the hands of three Russian oligarchs, is likely to come up for sale 
at the end of next year.

The stakes at Sakhalin are high, which perhaps explains why the 
geopolitical tensions are so high and why the Japanese government 
intervened yesterday in the dispute on behalf of its two minority 
shareholders in the project, Mitsubishi and Mitsui.

The UK ambassador to Russia said yesterday he was "deeply concerned", 
Tokyo warned Moscow that bilateral ties could be damaged, and the 
European Union's energy commissioner, Andris Piebalgs, said he 
regarded the situation as "very serious". Sakhalin-2 is due to start 
supplying Japan and South Korea with gas within the next two years 
and it is rightly regarded as one of the gems in Russia's energy 
crown.

A spokesman for the Russian government said yesterday that Shell 
could have the licence revoked "within a day or two", raising the 
spectre of work grinding to a halt. The licence relates to Shell's 
environmental obligations in the area.

The oil and gas it is trying to get at lies under the feeding grounds 
of critically endangered whales and must be exported through a new 
pipeline that will criss-cross 1,100 rivers and streams.

Russia's Natural Resources Ministry alleges that Shell has flouted 
the country's environmental legislation. "We are not against foreign 
investment," Oleg Mitvol, the head of Russia's state environment 
agency, said yesterday. "But we are against attempts to make us look 
like a banana republic."

The revenue-sharing agreement that underpins Sakhalin-2 was signed in 
1993 and allows Moscow to get a slice of the profits only when the 
project finally comes on line.

So far Russia has not received a rouble, apart from the delays, and 
has been told that the cost of bringing the oil and gas ashore has 
doubled to $20bn, delaying the moment when Kremlin Inc can begin 
reaping serious profits still further. Analysts say that Shell seems 
to think it can act as if Russia was frozen in time in 1993 when the 
deal was first signed.

The original agreement was inked at a time when Russia was on its 
knees and when then President Boris Yeltsin was borrowing as fast as 
he could.

With near-record oil prices and a booming Russian economy today the 
situation is very different though and if there is one thing Moscow 
is not short of it is capital.

One Western oil expert said: "Shell is in difficulty because when it 
did the original deal with the Russians it got extremely sweet terms. 
There is tremendous resentment in Russia about the terms of that deal 
which are now seen as far too favourable to Shell.

"The oil price was a lot lower and the Russians needed Western 
investment. Now that the oil price has rocketed the Russians want a 
better deal and they are determined to get it. They are seeking to 
achieve it through the medium of their state-owned oil companies."

Adam Landes, an oil and gas analyst at Renaissance Capital, concedes 
that Russia could have spelled out its concerns to Shell better and 
like many others, he believes that Russia's environmental concerns 
are a convenient tool to pile on pressure.

But he believes that Moscow is not behaving unreasonably and that any 
other foreign government would behave in the same way if it thought 
it had been badly let down by a foreign investor.

"Shell doesn't have a position to bargain from," he aid. "Russia has 
realised that natural resources are its greatest asset and that it 
doesn't have to give them away anymore.

"It has been saying for months now that it doesn't want PSAs 
(production-sharing agreements) but it strikes me that foreign 
investors have not been listening. It's not such a terrible thing 
that's being asked."

BP could be faced with similar uncertainty at the end of next year 
when the shareholder lock-in at TKN-BP ends. Privately, company 
executives accept that the dynamics of the joint company will change 
should Gazprom or Rosneft become the Russian shareholder. The 
question is in what way.

One of TNK-BP's key assets, for instance, is the giant Kovytka gas 
field in eastern Siberia which is so far undeveloped. To get the gas 
to market, TNK-BP will need the support of Gazprom, which controls 
Russia's gas infrastructure. BP insiders insist that what will not 
change are the corporate governance rules or legal structure under 
which the joint company was set up. It is registered in the Virgin 
Islands and any shareholder disputes have to be settled under UK law.

Mr Landes of Renaissance Capital argues that investors should not 
take fright but rather realise that Russia has changed and is a very 
different country from that in 1993. "Russia is signalling that it 
wants investment, both foreign and Russian, but it wants business 
done on its terms," he said. For the moment, that message appears to 
have been lost in translation, though. 

[2]

Jeremy Warner's Outlook: Dancing with the Russian bear is proving a 
high-risk game for our Western oil giants 

The Independent: 20 September 2006

Dancing with the Russian bear can be dangerous to your wealth. 

Nobody knows this better than Lord Browne of Madingley, chief 
executive of BP.

He's already lost one fortune through the encounter.

Once bitten, twice shy, you might have thought, but on the basis that 
Russia was becoming one of the biggest oil and gas producers in the 
world and BP therefore couldn't afford not to be there, Lord Browne 
hopped straight back into bed with the very same oligarchs who had 
ripped him off first time around.

His second bite at the cherry - TNK-BP - has thus far proved an 
altogether more advantageous one. In just three years, BP has had all 
its original capital investment of $8.5bn (£4.5bn) back in dividends 
and asset sales.

Yet BP still owns half the company and if the Kremlin is indeed hell 
bent on expelling the foreigner in its efforts to re-establish 
control over Russia's energy assets, then this would knock a mighty 
hole in BP's reserves and profits. The Russian government has already 
done it once with Yukos, since renamed Rosneft and floated on the 
London and Moscow stock markets. That was a special case, say 
apologists, as Yukos's founder, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, had evaded his 
taxes and in a very public way had attempted to set up a state within 
the state by bribing the Russian Duma.

Unfortunately, the evidence of the past month suggests that it 
perhaps wasn't as much of a one- off as presented. With the chorus of 
"what about the grey whale" echoing in its ears, the Russian 
government's natural resources ministry has now formally withdrawn an 
environmental permit for the $20bn Royal Dutch Shell-led Sakhalin-2 
development inRussia's far east. That the grey whale would fare 
better in Russian hands than those of Shell seems rather doubtful, 
but of course everyone knows the withheld permit has got nothing to 
do with the environment.

Instead it's about money, as these things usually are, and in 
particular about the terms on which Shell and others originally went 
into Sakhalin in the late 1990s. Even then, with the oil price flat 
on its back and Russia desperate for foreign investment following 
default on its overseas debts, the deal looked a giveaway. Today the 
terms of Shell's production-sharing agreement seem like outright 
theft from a Russian point of view, never mind that we in the West 
tend to regard a contract as a contract. The trouble with Russia is 
that it has yet to learn these niceties of the capitalist system. The 
negotiating point is around an asset swap that Shell had been 
planning with Gazprom, the state-controlled Russian gas company. The 
idea was that Shell would give up part of its Sakhalin-2 spoils in 
return for a stake in Gazprom assets elsewhere.

Gazprom yesterday formally withdrew from these negotiations, but 
presumably the door would be open again together with the promise of 
the environmental permit if Shell was prepared to given ground on 
what's swapped for what. What is plain, as this column has been 
warning for some years now, is that in matters commercial, the 
Russians cannot be trusted.

These are the wild eastern frontiers of capitalism where despite 
Russia's attempts to join the modern world the rule of law has yet to 
be properly recognised. Anyone with any understanding of Russian 
history, with its tradition of arbitrary, authoritarian government, 
would know the dangers. The potential rewards are vast, but the risks 
daunting.

Nobody is yet suggesting that Russia would attempt to sequestrate 
BP's interest in TNK-BP. By deliberately not going the production-
sharing route, where past agreements may be open to interpretation, 
but instead investing directly in a Russian oil company, Lord Browne 
seems to be on somewhat firmer ground. His partners can sell at the 
end of next year should they wish. The last thing BP would want to do 
is buy them out, even if the Kremlin said it was allowable. Rightly, 
Lord Browne figures that his best defence is for TNK to be seen as 
Russian controlled.

As the state moves to assert control over strategically important 
assets, the most likely buyer would be Gazprom. Would Lord Browne 
feel any more comfortable with such a partner? Possibly yes, as 
snuggling up to the state is part of the price that must be paid for 
practising business in Russia.

It might also help with other projects BP has in common with Gazprom 
in this energy rich land. That was certainly the thinking behind BP's 
support for the Rosneft flotation. Whether Shell's notable absence 
from the list of share buyers in Rosneft has had any bearing on 
current events is an interesting question, but if you chose to dance 
with the Russian bear, you must expect to keep sweet talking him even 
when he's trampling all over your feet.

Funnily enough, BP is proving rather better at negotiating the 
realpolitik of Russian business than it is in the US.

Virtuously abstaining from all political donations in the US may have 
won BP brownie points with the ethical investing brigade - if that is 
indeed possible for an oil company - but it has done the company few 
favours in its hour of need on Capitol Hill, where such payments are 
regarded as routine. As the list of US disasters pile up, BP has 
found itself almost entirely friendless on the other side of the 
pond. I doubt Lord Browne is making the same mistake out east.



-- http://www.fastmail.fm - I mean, what is it about a decent email 
service?

Este correo lo ha enviado
Néstor Miguel Gorojovsky
nestorgoro en fibertel.com.ar
[No necesariamente es su autor]
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"La patria tiene que ser la dignidad arriba y el regocijo abajo".
Aparicio Saravia
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