Rosneft Goes Public…Sort Of

From the WaPo:

On sale now, for a limited time only: shares of a company whose secretive chairman is a former KGB member who steers clear of foreigners; whose crown jewel was, in effect, expropriated from another company; and whose future hinges on the power of Russian politicians scheduled to leave office in two years.
Despite all that, investors are lining up to get in on the deal. And some of the biggest names in international banking — J.P. Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, ABN AMRO Rothschild, Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein and Goldman Sachs — are helping to bring it to market.
The company is OAO Rosneft, a Russian state-owned oil and gas company with assets that have been estimated at more than $60 billion and which is chaired by Igor Sechin, deputy chief of staff to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Yesterday in Moscow, the company’s president, Sergei Bogdanchikov, met with investors and released details of a draft prospectus to raise $11.6 billion in an initial public offering on the London Stock Exchange.
The offering would be the fourth-biggest ever, but its significance goes far beyond mere investment decisions. The sale of Rosneft marks another step in the evolution of Russia, which has gone from Communism to a period dominated by freewheeling corporate oligarchs to an era in which Putin has overseen a reconsolidation of state power over the economy, especially the oil sector.

Posted by on June 27th, 2006 at 11:42 am


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