TNK-BP said billionaire investor Mikhail Fridman resigned as chief executive officer, deepening a dispute between the oil giant and Russian shareholders at Russia’s third-largest oil producer.
Fridman (48), who will leave within 30 days, also resigned from the company’s management board, though Viktor Vekselberg and German Khan, fellow shareholders in AAR, which owns 50 per cent of TNK-BP, will remain, the company said.
BP owns the rest of the venture, which accounts for about 25 per cent of its production and reserves. Fridman was supposed to stay at the helm of the company until the end of 2013.
In 2008, current BP CEO Bob Dudley was forced to resign as head of the venture and leave Russia. More recently, the billionaires sued BP over a deal with Russia’s state oil company, and the board hasn’t met this year because the investors can’t agree on an independent director.
“BP has already found it difficult to find candidates to replace its nominees as non-executive directors and identifying a CEO is likely to be even harder,” said Peter Hutton, an analyst at Royal Bank of Canada in London.
A TNK-BP spokesman declined to provide reasons for Fridman’s resignation. Corporate Governance Fridman wasnt directly involved in day-to-day operations, which will continue to be run by the management committee, Vladimir Buyanov, a BP spokesman in Moscow, said.
AAR, the group that represents the Russian shareholders, are seeking to fill a vacant slot on its 11-member board of directors after two of three independent members – former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and James Leng, a former chairman of steelmaker Corus Group – quit last year.
Those resignations followed legal claims AAR filed to halt BP’s planned $7.8 billion share swap and Arctic tie-up with Russian oil champion OAO Rosneft. Fridman remains one of four AAR directors on TNK-BPs board. AAR and BP last week agreed to appoint Evert Henkes, a former head of Royal Dutch Shell Plc’s chemicals unit, as an independent director, leaving one open slot. Both sides agreed to delay paying dividends for the first quarter until the third independent director is found, allowing for a quorum. – (Bloomberg)
