Rosneft has closed a deal to acquire a 35.3% stake in Taas-Yuryakh Neftegazodobycha from Sberbank. The value of the deal was set to correspond to the historic cost of the project for Sberbank, equalling $444 million.
Rosneft has increased its stake in OJSC Eastern Siberian Oil and Gas Company (OJSC Vostsibneftegaz) from 70.78% to 99.87% through the acquisition of shares from Montenore Investment LTD and from minority shareholders as part of a mandatory buy back offer procedure. The Company paid 9.3 billion rubles to consolidate its stake in OJSC Vostsibneftegaz.
Notes for editors:
Taas-Yuryakh Neftegazodobycha is the holder of oil production licences for the Srednebotuobinsk oil and gas condensate deposit, which is situated 160 km north of the ESPO crude pipeline. C1 category oil reserves are estimated to stand at 90.9 million tonnes and С2 category reserves at 38.9 million tonnes. Due to its scale, on March 18, 2010 the Srednebotuobinsk oil and gas deposit was included in the list of deposits of federal importance.
Until 2009, the 35.3 percent stake in Taas-Yuryakh Neftegazodobycha was held by Urals Energy, which in the course of the financial crisis in 2008-2009 had to hand over the asset to Sberbank Capital to cover overdue loans.
The remaining stakes are held by Yakut Energy Limited (37.4 percent) and Finfund Limited (16.8 percent), as well as Limenitis Holding Limited (10.5 percent). The latter is part of the Ashmore Investment Management Group.
OJSC Vostsibneftegaz owns licenses for geological exploration and development of the Yurubcheno-Tokhomskoye oil and gas condensate field and the Agaleevskoye gas field in Eastern Siberia.
The unique Yurubcheno-Tokhomskoye field (which is part of the Yurubchenskoye license block) contains recoverable C1 reserves of 125.6 million tonnes of oil and 152.4 billion cubic metres of gas and recoverable C2 reserves of 181.7 million tonnes of oil and 184.6 billion cubic metres of gas.
Full-scale development of the deposit was launched following an investment decision by Transneft to construct a 603 km long oil pipeline from fields in the Yurubcheno-Tokhomskoye area to Tayshet (the start of the Eastern Siberia–Pacific Ocean pipeline) and the introduction of a special tax regime. The latter is due to the significant investment that will be required to develop the field given its remote location and the complex geological structure of the deposit.
