 New BP boss off to Russia to mend fences with Moscow: report London (AFP) July 31, 2010 - Incoming BP boss Bob Dudley will next week fly to Moscow to meet shareholders of its Russian joint venture TNK-BP, as relations thaw between the two companies, the Financial Times said Saturday. The visit will be Dudley's first trip to Russia since being forced to flee the country in 2008 when he was head of TNK-BP amid a bitter battle between BP and its Russian partners over control of the venture, the paper said. Dudley will travel with Tony Hayward, BP's outgoing chief executive and the pair will also meet senior government officials, according to a person familiar with the visit, the FT added. BP declined to comment. The visit is likely to include discussion of the sale of BP assets in Venezuela to TNK-BP, the business daily said. BP on Tuesday said it was seeking to raise 30 billion dollars (23 billion euros) from asset sales to help meet the costs of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, which led the group to also say that Hayward would depart on October 1. Hayward, who is to remain a BP board member until November 30, has meanwhile been nominated as a non-executive director of TNK-BP. |
Deputy Oil Minister Hossein Noqrehkar Shirazi also said that Tehran's oil exports to China fell by 30 percent in the first six months of 2010 compared with the corresponding period last year.
"The volume (of Chinese investment) in upstream projects is 29 billion dollars," Noqrehkar Shirazi told Mehr news agency, adding that Beijing had signed contracts worth another 10 billion dollars in petrochemicals, refineries and oil and gas pipeline projects.
He said China has also put forward proposals to participate in building seven new refineries in Iran.
Iran, OPEC's second largest oil exporter, has a dilapidated refining sector, forcing it to import petroleum products such as gasoline to meet domestic needs.
Noqrehkar Shirazi said that Chinese imports of Iranian oil fell in the first half of the year.
"Although Iran is still among top 10 oil exporters to China, it is the only country which in the first six months of 2010 has seen its exports to China falling," he said.
"The volume of oil exports to China in the first six months of this year decreased to less than 9.02 million tonnes or 66.12 million barrels. This shows a 30 percent decrease" over the first half of 2009, he added.
In recent years, China has filled the gaps in Iran's energy sector left by Western firms forced out by international sanctions.
In 2009, China became Iran's premier trading partner, with bilateral trade worth 21.2 billion dollars against 14.4 billion dollars three years earlier.
Commercial ties between the two countries were almost non-existent 15 years ago, amounting to just 400 million dollars.
According to official data, Western sanctions opened the way for Chinese companies, which last year directly supplied Iran with 13 percent (7.9 billion dollars) of its imports.
Iranian estimates also suggest that an equivalent amount was imported indirectly through the United Arab Emirates in 2009.
China backed the fourth set of UN sanctions against Iran over its contested nuclear programme, but Beijing has consistently urged the world powers to resolve the crisis diplomatically.
On Friday, it also opposed the latest unilateral sanctions on Iran imposed by the European Union.
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