RUSSIAN Prime Minister Vladimir Putin says he warned BP and its four billionaire partners against setting up a 50-50 venture, TNK-BP, which is now racked by disputes over strategy and control.
"I warned them several years ago that such problems will emerge," Putin told French newspaper Le Monde.
"Choose one side to have a majority stake. And we don't mind if it's BP, or the Russian side of the joint venture," Putin said he told the shareholders when they consulted him at the time TNK-BP was formed.
The shareholder dispute became public when TNK-BP's chief executive officer, Robert Dudley, described some disagreements in an interview with Vedomosti newspaper last Monday, Bloomberg News said.
London-based BP, which produces more oil in Russia than any other foreign company, has rejected a demand by the four billionaires to fire Dudley, amid reports that the state-run OAO Gazprom wanted to buy the venture. Mikhail Fridman, German Khan, Viktor Vekselberg and Len Blavatnik, who control half of TNK-BP, said Dudley ignored their interests, including plans to expand abroad. "Mr Dudley is managing the company in the interest of only one shareholder, namely BP," they said.
"For five years my role has been to balance the interests of the shareholders," Dudley said in Moscow. "I'll try to continue to maintain this balance."
The shareholders' conflict comes at the time when the Russian government is seeking to assert control over energy projects with foreign participation, such as Royal Dutch Shell's Sakhalin-2 oil and gas venture that state-owned Gazprom bought last year.
BP and AAR, as the partnership between Fridman's and Khan's Alfa Group, Blavatnik's Access Industries and Vekselberg's Renova Group is called, have repeatedly denied holding talks on selling their stakes. Gazprom called plans to take control of TNK-BP, Russia's third-largest oil producer, "speculation."
Gazprom, BP and TNK-BP announced in 2007 that they would form a new global venture with at least US$3 billion of assets. The deal has not yet been concluded.
TNK-BP accounts for a quarter of BP's oil production and fifth of its reserves globally.
"TNK-BP's direction is not irreversible" and the "road ahead is risky," Dudley said.