BP slams ‘illegal’ Moscow base raid

Oil giant BP called an armed raid on its Moscow office by Russian police and bailiffs “illegal” as the premises remained out of bounds to the company’s employees yesterday.

BP’s Russian spokesman Vladimir Buyanov said the firm’s office in a Moscow skyscraper was guarded by police with assault rifles, and the company was co-operating with the bailiffs.

It expects the search to keep its Moscow office closed for the rest of the week.

Wednesday’s raid is connected with a lawsuit in a Siberian court. Andrei Prokhorov, an obscure minority shareholder of BP’s Russian venture TNK-BP, is suing BP for £1.85 billion in damages for allowing an Arctic exploration deal with the Russian state-owned energy firm Rosneft to fall through.

Prokhorov said his interests were harmed as TNK-BP could have benefited from becoming part of the deal.

In London, BP spokesman David Nicholas said the company did not think “there is any legitimate basis” for the raid, and work at the office was “illegally being interfered with”.

The multi-billion Arctic deal between BP and Rosneft collapsed earlier this year after Russian TNK-BP shareholders contested the deal. They said BP was breaking TNK-BP’s shareholder agreement by entering into a deal without the venture’s knowledge or consent. TNK-BP’s operations are not being affected by Wednesday’s raid.

But Alexei Kokin, senior analyst with the Moscow-based UralSib investment bank, dismissed fears that the search could be a bad sign for BP’s business in Russia, saying it did not look “like the beginning of an end” for BP there.

“They’ve been through hard times in Russia before and their business hasn’t been affected,” he said.