Commodity trader Glencore Plc and Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund agreed to buy $11bn stake in Rosneft, Russia’s largest oil producer in a triumph for President Vladimir Putin over sanctions imposed by the West.
Russia said it had sold a 19.5% government stake in Rosneft for $11.3 billion to Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund and Glencore.
Glencore said it would finance part of the deal by putting up 300mn euros ($323.87mn) of its own equity, with the rest being financed by the Qatar Investment Authority and by non-recourse bank financing.
The deal was announced days after Russia and OPEC, dominated by Saudi Arabia and its allies Qatar, the UAE and Kuwait, agreed to coordinated output cuts to support oil prices.
The involvement of Qatar in a Russian privatisation deal comes as a surprise, especially given years of tensions over Syria, where Russia is effectively fighting a proxy war with Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
The Kremlin said that the Rosneft deal was purely commercial and not political.
“There were not and there aren’t any political aspects here,” Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, told reporters on a conference call when asked if any agreements on Syria were part of the talks.
The Kremlin was not involved in preparatory work on the deal, which was handled personally by Rosneft chief Igor Sechin and his team, Peskov said.
