Bailiffs raided the Moscow offices of a trading unit of British oil company BP yesterday and company sources said most of the staff were told not to go to work.
The bailiffs confirmed the raid, but gave no reason for it, one day after state-owned crude producer Rosneft and US oil company ExxonMobil Corp signed an agreement to develop Arctic offshore oil fields.
The deal followed the collapse of an agreement under which BP would have been Rosneft’s foreign partner in the Arctic offshore development project.
“We were ordered to leave the office and work from home,” a BP source said.
Russia’s search of BP’s Moscow office is linked to a lawsuit brought by minority shareholders in its TNK-BP Russian joint venture over BP’s failed bid to team up with Rosneft, a lawyer for the minority shareholders said yesterday.
Russian security forces searched BP’s headquarters in Moscow in 2008 during a corporate standoff at TNK-BP, in which the British company has a 50 percent stake.
On Tuesday, Exxon Mobil and Rosneft announced an agreement to extract oil and gas from the Russian Arctic, the most significant US-Russian corporate deal since US President Barack Obama began a push to improve ties.
For Exxon, the agreement gives the biggest US oil company access to substantial reserves in Russia, the world’s top oil producer. For Rosneft, it’s about bringing in one of the few companies capable of drilling in the harsh, deep waters of the Arctic.
Russia has shown greater willingness in the past year to secure foreign partners, even if some deals later fell apart. The Exxon announcement comes only months after the demise of a Rosneft deal with Chevron Corp for a US$1 billion investment in an estimated US$32 billion Black Sea project.
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin attended the Tuesday signing in the Black Sea resort of Sochi by Exxon chief executive Rex Tillerson and Russia’s top energy official, Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin.
“New horizons are opening up. One of the world’s leading companies, Exxon Mobil, is starting to work on Russia’s strategic shelf and deepwater continental shelf,” Putin said.
Exxon and Rosneft agreed to invest US$3.2 billion to develop East Prinovozemelsky Blocks 1, 2 and 3 in the Arctic Kara Sea and the Tuapse licensing block in the Black Sea.
Rosneft will own 66.7 percent and Exxon the rest of the joint venture to develop the blocks, which Exxon said were “among the most promising and least explored offshore areas globally, with high potential for liquids and gas.”
Rosneft said the Kara Sea blocks contain an estimated 36 billion barrels of recoverable oil resources. Total resources are estimated at 110 billion barrels of oil equivalent — more than four times Exxon’s proven worldwide reserves.
The Black Sea block is estimated to hold 9 billion barrels of oil reserves.
First drilling is planned to start in 2015, with Exxon shouldering most of the cost.
BUSINESS UPDATE: The iPhone assembler said operations outlook is expected to show quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year growth for the second quarter Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) yesterday reported strong growth in sales last month, potentially raising expectations for iPhone sales while artificial intelligence (AI)-related business booms. The company, which assembles the majority of Apple Inc’s smartphones, reported a 19.03 percent rise in monthly sales to NT$510.9 billion (US$15.78 billion), from NT$429.22 billion in the same period last year. On a monthly basis, sales rose 14.16 percent, it said. The company in a statement said that last month’s revenue was a record-breaking April performance. Hon Hai, known also as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), assembles most iPhones, but the company is diversifying its business to
Apple Inc has been developing a homegrown chip to run artificial intelligence (AI) tools in data centers, although it is unclear if the semiconductor would ever be deployed, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday. The effort would build on Apple’s previous efforts to make in-house chips, which run in its iPhones, Macs and other devices, according to the Journal, which cited unidentified people familiar with the matter. The server project is code-named ACDC (Apple Chips in Data Center) within the company, aiming to utilize Apple’s expertise in chip design for the company’s server infrastructure, the newspaper said. While this initiative has been
GlobalWafers Co (環球晶圓), the world’s No. 3 silicon wafer supplier, yesterday said that revenue would rise moderately in the second half of this year, driven primarily by robust demand for advanced wafers used in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips, a key component of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. “The first quarter is the lowest point of this cycle. The second half will be better than the first for the whole semiconductor industry and for GlobalWafers,” chairwoman Doris Hsu (徐秀蘭) said during an online investors’ conference. “HBM would definitely be the key growth driver in the second half,” Hsu said. “That is our big hope
The consumer price index (CPI) last month eased to 1.95 percent, below the central bank’s 2 percent target, as food and entertainment cost increases decelerated, helped by stable egg prices, the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) said yesterday. The slowdown bucked predictions by policymakers and academics that inflationary pressures would build up following double-digit electricity rate hikes on April 1. “The latest CPI data came after the cost of eating out and rent grew moderately amid mixed international raw material prices,” DGBAS official Tsao Chih-hung (曹志弘) told a news conference in Taipei. The central bank in March raised interest rates by