Russia Tatneft eyes Turk refiner Tupras
Tatneft’s statement quoted the firm’s head Chafagat Takhautdinov as saying the firm could bid for a 60-percent stake in Tupras together with another oil company. The statement gave no other details.
Russia’s third largest oil firm TNK, which is in the process of merging its assets with oil major BP BP.L, said in April it was also looking at acquiring refining assets in Turkey.
Turkey plans to complete collecting bids for Tupras, which controls 87 percent of the country’s refining market, in October. The sale is seen as a key deal in Turkey’s privatisation plan aimed at raising revenues to help handle a massive domestic debt within IMF-backed budgetary constraints.
Tupras is seeking to cut its dependence on the volatile Iraqi supplies and buy more crude on the Mediterranean spot market and under long-term deals with Russia.
The statement said Tatneft has recently agreed to boost oil sales to Tupras to 480,000 tonnes a month (117,000 barrels per day) from the previous level of 400,000 tonnes a month (97,000 barrels per day).
The firm said in May it planned to supply Tupras with 3.4 million tonnes of Urals crude URL-E in 2003, or 68,000 barrels per day.
The new deal means that Tatneft, owned by the Russian region of Tatarstan, will export from the Black Sea port of Novorossiisk to Turkey more than 70 percent of its total exports and more than one fifth of its 500,000-bpd output.
