Russia's Alfa Access Renova (AAR) consortium, BP's partner in the TNK-BP Russian joint venture, plans to make BP an offer for the British company's stake in the venture by July 19, AAR official Mikhail Loskutov said on Friday.
"AAR consortium is going to inform BP about its intention to start talks about buying its half ... of TNK-BP by July 19," Loskutov told Prime news agency.
Russian billionaire Mikhail Fridman, a member of AAR, which represents the four billionaires of Russian origin who own 50 percent of TNK-BP, resigned as TNK-BP's CEO in late May due to what he called a collapse of corporate management.
BP and the AAR partners have been locked in a long-running dispute over management of their Russian joint venture, which resulted in the replacement of the former TNK-BP CEO Robert Dudley in 2008.
That conflict, which went on for three months and ended with Dudley resigning and leaving Russia, was followed by another spat over whether BP was entitled to participate in a joint venture with Russia’s biggest crude producer, Rosneft, to explore and develop Russia’s Arctic shelf deposits.
The Financial Times reported in late June that Fridman was holding meetings with institutional investors to finance a purchase of BP's stake in the venture.
