Russia seeks to seize control of Royal Dutch Shell's Sakhalin project

[NNN0LHI]

http://news.independent.co.uk/business/news/article601387.ece

Royal Dutch Shell's flagship investment in Russia was facing uncertainty last night after the Natural Resources Ministry threatened to scale back the company's stake in a huge liquefied natural gas project to allow the Kremlin greater control.

The threat concerns the Sakhalin-2 project, the largest direct foreign investment in Russia, and a venture that will result in the world's biggest liquefied natural gas plant in the far east of Russia. Shell has a 55 per cent stake in the $10bn (£5.3bn) project while two Japanese firms own the other two stakes. The Russian government has a revenue-sharing arrangement with the consortium but is known to be keen to get a direct stake in the project as Moscow seeks to bring more strategic energy reserves under the Kremlin's control.

President Vladimir Putin has already urged Shell to honour a promise it apparently made to surrender a 25 per cent stake in the project in exchange for a share of a Siberian gas field.

Yesterday the pressure intensified when the Natural Resources Minister said it supported radical advice it had received from the country's Academy of Natural Science urging it to take a 51 per cent stake in three different revenue-sharing projects including Sakhalin-2.

[Jacobin]

1. these petroleum wars are getting to be interesting, no?

[LARED]

2. I work for an international company with a

market cap of nearly 10 billion that would love to invest capital in Russia.

But, there is little interest EXACTLY because of this type of nonsense.

[Swede]

3. The Kremlin seems to be shooting itself in the foot.

This must send chills down investor's spines.

[BayCityProgressive]

4. It seems

that even though capitalists made headway here...that communism never fully died.

[NNN0LHI]

5. It doesn't bother your company that the USA is seizing entire countries?

That is strange. I guess the difference is who is doing the seizing?

I suspect that Royal Dutch Shell was not complaining when the USA was taking over Iraq's oil fields that Russia had signed contracts to exploit.

What do you think?

Don