The French group has nearly 20% of Novatek, a large Russian gas company famous close to the Kremlin. BP, Shell and Equinor announced their exit from Russia.
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Can the Totallergies (ex-total) continue to operate in Russia, while several Western companies are already leaving the country to protest the war in Ukraine?
Under pressure from the British Government, another oil giant, BP, announced, Sunday, February 27, that it intended to sell its 19.75% interest in the Russian Russian group – second local oil producer. The Director General of BP, Bernard Looney, also resigned from Rosneft’s Board of Directors “with immediate effect”. A radical decision that may be expensive for BP – its participation was valued at $ 14 billion (€ 12.4 billion) end 2021.
Monday, February 28, it is the Norwegian public firm Equinor (ex-Statoil) who announced put an end to his partnership with Rosneft. Equinor holds $ 1.2 billion of assets in Russia. An announcement followed by the Anglo-Dutch group Shell, which interrupted its partnership with Gazprom at the end of the day Monday.
Contacted by Le Monde, TotalEnergies refuses to any comments on the subject, but does not count, for the time being, cease its commitments. Russia is today the first source of production for the French group: in 2020, 17% of its petrozing production was on Russian territory, mainly gas, but also oil – and 25% of its reservations as well. Thursday, February 24, cited by the France-Presse agency (AFP), Patrick Pouyanné, the CEO of the company, insisted on another percentage, as if it were to minimize this importance: the Russian market represents ” between 3% and 5% “of the company’s revenues.
The French Major” on the saddle “
TotalEnergies is a shareholder, up to 19.4%, from Russian Novatek. This company is not public, unlike Rosneft, but it was founded and remains presided over by Leonid Mikhelon, a renowned billionaire near the Kremlin. Three representatives of Totalnergies sit on his board of directors.
At the inauguration, in December 2017, from one of the great projects of the Russian group, Yamal-LNG, a gas export plant through the Arctic waters, the Russian President, Vladimir Putin , had come in person to greet the role played by Leonid Mikhelon, in the presence of Patrick Pouyanné. TotalEnergies is also one of Novatek’s main partners in this project – as in a neighboring gas site, Arctic LNG 2, which is not yet in operation. The Yamal project received at the time the support of the French authorities through an export guarantee – even though Russia was already under international sanction, since 2014, for the invasion of Crimea. The Novatek and Totalnergies strategy in Siberia is to build on ice melting in the Arctic to be able to export more and more liquefied natural gas (LNG) by boat to China and South Korea – a road that is only available only a few months in the year.
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