TNK's Fridman Aims to Buy BP Oil Fields in Push Beyond Russia

[dipsydoodle]

Source: Bloomberg

Mikhail Fridman, executive chairman of Russian oil producer TNK-BP, said the company is ready to buy fields in Venezuela, Vietnam and other countries BP Plc is selling to cover costs for the Gulf of Mexico spill.

TNK-BP, an equal partnership between London-based BP and a group of Russian billionaires, should “expand broadly in the world,” Fridman, who is also interim chief executive officer, said in an interview at his Moscow office. BP “has no need to sell to a competitor and make them stronger.”

The board will consider buying BP assets at the end of the month. The meeting will be the first to include Tony Hayward, appointed as a director of TNK-BP after he resigned as BP’s chief executive officer because of the U.S. spill. BP is selling $30 billion of oil and gas production assets over the next 18 months.

Fridman, Russia’s third-richest man and head of the Alfa Group whose businesses range from banking to mobile phones along with oil and gas, said the Russian shareholders’ relationship with BP has changed since a dispute in 2008 came close to ending the partnership. Bob Dudley, who headed TNK-BP at the time and was forced to leave Moscow, takes the helm at London-based BP next month. Dudley and Hayward recently met Fridman in his office, the billionaire said.

Read more: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-09-20/tnk-s-fridman-ready-to-buy-bp-oil-fields-in-push-beyond-russia.html

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So much for those of low intelligence here who said Hayward had been exiled to Siberia. :rofl: