Bashneft to ask govt to reassign Trebs-Titov license to JV with Lukoil in near future
MOSCOW. Oct 23 (Interfax) - Bashneft will submit an application to the Russian government to reassign the license for the Trebs and Titov fields from Bashneft to Bashneft-Polyus - a joint venture between Bashneft and Lukoil - in the next several days.
"We are preparing the application, and we will submit it in the near future, a matter of days," Bashneft President Alexander Korsik told Interfax.
Korsik did not say whether or not Bashneft would manage to finish reassigning the license by the end of this year. "In this case everything doesn't depend on us, but rather on the government and the prompt work of state entities," he said.
Bashneft and Lukoil management have expressed hope that the Trebs-Titov license will be transferred from Bashneft to Bashneft-Polyus by the end of this year. Korsik said that the license reassignment accounts for adjustments made to oil refining capacities and that "the issue of foreign participation has not been raised, besides a minority shareholder query, as was previously reported."
Last year, the government decided to give Bashneft the license for the giant Trebs and Titov oil fields in the Nenets Autonomous District, after the tender was declared invalid. Later, the license was reassigned to Bashneft-Polyus, and Lukoil shelled out 4.8 billion rubles for a 25.1% stake in the joint venture.
In May 2012, Bashneft minority shareholder Svetlana Proskuryakova filed a lawsuit seeking to annul the Federal Subsurface Resources Agency (Rosnedra) order to transfer the license to Trebs and Titov to Bashneft-Polyus. She claimed the transfer was made with violations that result in there being a risk that the license will be lost. In light of these claims, Rosnedra reversed the order to transfer the license from Bashneft to Bashneft-Polyus and asked the court to dismiss the lawsuit filed by Proskuryakova, which the court did.
The Trebs and Titov oilfields have federal status and can be developed only by companies that are more than 50% Russian-owned. The licenses to such fields can be sold or transferred with permission from the Federal Anti-Monopoly Service (FAS) and the government commission on foreign investment.
