The four co-owners of the BVI-controlled joint venture TNK-BP with British oil company British Petroleum (BP) plan legal action to deprive BP-nominated directors of their powers. The deadline for reaching agreement in the course of this long-running dispute passed on June 11, and the four billionaires are going to sue BP in a Stockholm court and launch separate legal action in Moscow.
BP offered the oligarchs, – German Khan and Michail Fridman of Alfa Group, Viktor Vekselberg and Len Blavatnik, – to sell their stakes in TNK-BP, which made net profits of $5.3 billion last year, but they are said to have no interest in selling.
A source close to BP denied that the company wanted to buy out the stakes of Russian shareholders, saying the Russians had in fact asked BP to buy their share.
It was said by the officials that Russian shareholders wanted to change TNK-BP’s CEO for a “truly independent†person, believing that current incumbent Robert Dudley represented only BP’s interests. The Russian side, in its turn, believes that BP violated the terms of an agreement governing the use of BP secondees by bringing in a large number of staff who worked in managerial rather than in technical positions.
Under the shareholding structure of TNK-BP, BP and the four Russians own equal shares in a British Virgin Islands-registered company, which in its turn owns through subsidiaries a 95% interest in the Russian company TNK-BP Holding. The remainder part is owned by the minority shareholders.
TNK-BP Ltd. was incorporated in BVI in 2003 as a result of a merger of Access/Renova consortium and Alfa Group with the British BP.