LUKOIL's appetite has grown

The company wants to buy PetroKazakhstan entirely

Late this evening Moscow time, a Canadian court is due to announce whether it approves the deal to buy PetroKazakhstan, a Chinese CNPC registered in Canada, for $4.18 billion. But now the Chinese have a competitor - yesterday LUKOIL announced that it was ready to acquire PetroKazakhstan for the same price. price.

All PetroKazakhstan assets are located in Kazakhstan - these are 11 fields with proven reserves of 392 million barrels (53.5 million tons) of oil equivalent, the Chimkent oil refinery, one of three in the republic, which supplies the south of the country with fuel.

PetroKazakhstan announced it was in talks to sell its business in June after running into serious problems with the government. As experts note, the essence of the conflict was that the owners of the enterprise did not want to sell fuel at preferential prices during the sowing and harvesting campaigns. As a result, PetroKazakhstan was accused of monopolism; several criminal cases were opened against its leaders and they were threatened with deprivation of licenses.

In August, the board of directors of PetroKazakhstan approved the sale of the company to the Chinese CNPC. True, the deal was not so easy to complete. Kazakh authorities declared PetroKazakhstan a strategic asset and quickly amended legislation to give them a pre-emption right. CNPC was forced to comply: on October 17, it entered into a partnership agreement with the state-owned Kazmunaigas, undertaking to resell to it part of the shares of PetroKazakhstan and allow it to manage the Chimkent plant. The details of the agreement are not known, according to sources familiar with the negotiations, we are talking about 33% in PetroKazakhstan and 50% of the plant, while statements were made that the Kazakh side is counting on 50% in PetroKazakhstan itself.

However, CNPC's problems did not stop there. Recently, LUKOIL announced that it intends to exercise the right of priority to buy out a stake in Turgai Petroleum, a joint company with PetroKazakhstan, which they own on a parity basis. Last year, the partners in the joint venture had a conflict; as a result, they demanded $256 million from each other in the arbitration court of the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce. In addition, LUKOIL announced on October 5 that it had appealed to the same court, since “the preemptive right to Turgai Petroleum shares is provided for by the shareholders’ agreement, according to which, in the event of a change of control over one of the shareholders, the second has the right to purchase shares at an agreed price " The owners of PetroKazakhstan do not recognize this right.

Although 99% of PetroKazakhstan shareholders approved its sale to CNPC on October 18, the deal has not yet been completed. According to Canadian law, any such agreement must be approved by a local court, to which LUKOIL also appealed to demand recognition of its preemptive right. As a result, the decision was postponed until October 26. Yesterday’s statement from LUKOIL noted: “The company has made several attempts to negotiate with CNPC and PetroKazakhstan to resolve the issue. In particular, LUKOIL made an offer to acquire 50% of Turgai Petroleum from CNPC at a fair price consistent with CNPC’s approach to valuing PetroKazakhstan’s assets. However, negotiations have so far been unsuccessful.” Now LUKOIL wants to buy out the Canadian company completely.

At the same time, the Russian holding has good relations with the Kazakh authorities. LUKOIL is pursuing several major projects in the country, and on Friday its head, Vagit Alekperov, met with the President of the Republic, Nursultan Nazarbayev, to whom he informed that the holding had invested $4.5 billion in the country, including the recent purchase of the Kazakh oil company Nelson. By the way, LUKOIL had no problems with the approval of this deal by official Astana.

Denis REBROV