Half a billion dollars paid TNK-BP BP employees for five years for work in Russia

The newspaper Vedomosti cites the decision of the Tyumen Region Arbitration Court in the claim of Tetlis CJSC, where the exact amount of TNK-BP expenses for BP specialists in 2003-2008 is first given-$ 489.6 million. By agreement between TNK-BP Management and BP, which is disputed by Tetlis, employees of the British company since 2003 have worked on TNK-BP in Russia (recently all 148 specialists were forced to leave the country).

In the text of the court decision, the transfer of this money was declared a "feigned transaction": "There is no main feature indicating the reality of the disputed agreement."

The court argument is as follows: BP and TNK-BP Management could not confirm who the Russian company paid for and what. Once a month, the parties signed acts on the provision of personnel, but there are no data on the positions of people who came from the BP, about the volume of work performed, there is no confirmation of how much BP spent on business travelers to these employees.

The conclusion is that the purpose of the contract was exclusively payments on it, and the transaction itself covered the "gratuitous transfer of funds (donation)". The “donor” was not the management company “TNK-BP Management”, but “TNK-BP Holding” and its production “daughters”, at whose expense the services of the British were paid.