Patient

BP Could Lose $20 Billion to Gazprom

Some of my colleagues (who make their investment decision based on articles in Economist shorting oil $7) made fun of me after I bought Gazprom at high mark of $1.9 following 100% run.

I still keep smiling and remain a shareholder of the company that instead of paying millions in bonuses to incompetent CEOs and cooking their books pays dividends to millions of shareholders. I guess you prefer privately run Enrons, Bear Sterns etc 

BP Could Lose $20 Billion to Gazprom

Stephanie,

First of all to get credibility an analyst should check the facts before jumping to conclusions. I am both BP and Gazprom shareholder I tend to read the documents and study history of the deals.
1) BP had never owned 51% as stated in the article
2) BP investment was 50% that is a big difference:
• invested $7bln 5 years ago
• received more than $10bln in dividends ca, 28% yields
• sold Kovykta gas field (still undeveloped for $800-1000 mm vs. cumulative investment of ca. $400mm) – not exactly a robbery
• rumors says Gazprom offeres $15-20 bln for 50% stake - that would mean 6 times increase on the initial investment (5 year IRR – 44%) – the best investment BP ever made.
3) Sidanko did use questionable tax optimization schemes and had a ‘reserve” for exactly that purposes.

I understand that is much easier to copy and paste WSJ with catchy title than to perform a real analysis.

BTW how did you come up with $20bln loss?


Sanibel:

It would be nice to know your criteria of corruption.

I am somewhat familiar with Russian goverments and by any standard corruption decreased significantly over last ten years.

As an ethical investor you should have divested Shell in 90’s when they were quite happy to deal with corrupt incompetent Yeltsin government officials rushing to sell the country piecemeal. Shell had a history of relying on corrupt regimes to get cheap access to resources (Shakh in Iran) and totally knew the risk it was taking. And as in the case of BP it didn’t have a loss from the sale of 50% just legal double digit return instead of illegal triple digit.