Oil giant Rosneft and its president Sergey Bogdanchikov have kept the promise, buying gas stations and other facilities that once belonged to YUKOS.
Photo: Dmitry Azarov
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Rosneft Buys YUKOS Gas Stations
Oil giant Rosneft has kept its promise, buying gas stations and other facilities that once belonged to bankrupt YUKOS. The little-known Yuniteks, which is believed to have links with Gazprombank, reaped $150 million on the resale, making Rosneft one of the largest oil retailers in the country. Rosneft, however, will own 100 percent in 232 out of 495 gas stations.
Rosneft said Tuesday it signed a deal with Yuniteks to buy YUKOS’s 495 gas stations and oil product terminal for just over 16 billion rubles.
Yuniteks, a little-known firm whose owners have not been identified, won an auction for the lot on May 10, offering 12.5 billion rubles with a start price of 7.7 billion rubles. Shell and TNK-BP were also bidding for the chain of gas stations in 12 regions. Yuniteks has thus earned some 3.9 billion rubles on the deal. Earlier reports said Yuniteks has links with gas producer Gazprom and its subsidiary Gazprombank.
Rosneft added that it bought 100-percent stakes in 232 gas stations while all others are still to be owned together with administrations of the regions where several YUKOS’s oil business units were registered. The subsidiaries enjoyed special tax privileges, which went on to become part of accusations against YUKOS CEO Mikhail Khodorkovsky and his colleagues. Rosneft has not decided if it would buy out the regional shares, but says it will consider sale offers.
The purchase has raised the number of Rosneft’s gas stations to over 1,550 I Russia, second only to LUKOIL’s 1,658, according to Andrey Fedorov, an analyst with Alfa Bank. The chain of LUKOIL unites as much as 5,800 stations including filling stations abroad.
www.kommersant.com
All the Article in Russian as of June 27, 2007
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