Anchorage Daily News

MOSCOW -- The Russian shareholders involved in a bitter public dispute with BP over its Russian joint venture have no intention of selling their stake, a billionaire tycoon said Monday.

Mikhail Fridman said he and the other Russian partners in TNK-BP will press their demands for the ouster of its American chief executive and other changes in the oil company, which he said is pursuing the interests of BP to the detriment of its own development.

BP issued a statement late Monday denying the company was being mismanaged. The venture supplied roughly one-third of BP's total oil production last year, according to company filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Alaska supplied 9 percent.

Fridman said the Russian shareholders would use lawsuits to seek parity on the board and an equal say in setting strategy because talks have brought no resolution of the escalating conflict at the 50-50 company once seen as a success story for Western business in Russia.

"We will not give anything that by rights belongs to us away to anyone, including levers for running the company," Fridman told a news conference -- part of a broadside that also included interviews with Russian shareholders in two Russian newspapers.

The public-relations push by AAR, which unites Fridman's Alfa Group with Viktor Vekselberg's Renova Group and Len Blavatnik's Access Industries, came after BP's chairman likened the trio to corporate raiders in the style of Russia's cutthroat 1990s capitalism, and suggested they were out for control and possibly ownership of the company.

Fridman said it was the other side that was turning to questionable tactics.

Lacking "substantive, reasonable arguments," he said, TNK-BP Chief Executive Robert Dudley and others have sought "to cast this as a conflict between a recognized, respectable Western company and wild hordes of Russian oligarchs who are trying to seize power through dirty methods."

BP sprang to the defense of the company.

"We reject the accusation made by (Fridman) that TNK-BP has underperformed in recent years," the statement said, according to a spokesman.

Fridman reiterated the Russian shareholders' calls for the replacement of Dudley and appointment of an "independent" CEO; cuts in the number of BP employees sent to work for TNK-BP in Russia, which they say wastes money and creates tax risks; and equal board representation.

BP countered that it "fully supports the management of TNK-BP, which has made the company one of the best performers in Russia in recent years." It released a host of figures it said back up its claims.

The increasingly public confrontation has led to speculation that the Russian shareholders want to gain control of TNK-BP and possibly sell it to a state-owned company.

But Fridman insisted he and the other Russian shareholders have no plans to sell and repeated AAR's core contention: that Dudley and other BP-backed managers are putting BP's interests ahead of those of TNK-BP.

"Nobody is selling anything here," he said. "We are talking about making this company, TNK-BP, function as an independent structure and not a subsidiary of BP."

Armed with charts, slides and CD-ROMs for reporters, Fridman said the current approach is stifling what could be explosive growth, hurting the interests of some shareholders and keeping the company out of potentially lucrative projects outside Russia and Ukraine.

In an interview published Monday in the daily Vedomosti, Fridman claimed that TNK-BP balked at a potentially lucrative project in Iraq's Kurdistan region because of U.S. opposition, and that Dudley forbade the company from negotiating with Cuba, Iran and Syria.

At the news conference, he said he did not mean to imply TNK-BP was involved in some "geopolitical conspiracy." But he suggested its potential to do deals abroad is restricted by the poor relationships Britain and the U.S. have with such countries.

The Anchorage Daily News contributed to this story.

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