Any Other Business | 22 January 2011

It’s business, Russian-style – and let’s hope it’sthird time lucky for BP’s Bob Dudley

‘It was just business, Russian-style.’ That was how Bob Dudley described to me his experience in 2008 of having to manage the TNK-BP joint venture in Siberia by email from a secret location in Central Europe — because BP’s Russian partners had made it too dangerous for him to remain in the country. They did so partly by provoking tax and work-permit hassles which might not have been possible without the tacit approval of Vladimir Putin.

And that wasn’t Dudley’s first bad experience of Russian negotiating techniques: in his days with Amoco, before it merged into BP, he spent two maddening years in Moscow failing to nail down a strategic alliance with Yukos, the oil giant controlled by the now-imprisoned oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky. So it seems remarkable that, in his first big gambit as BP’s chief executive, he has returned for a third bout in the Russian arena, shaking prime minister Putin’s cold and clammy hand over a £10 billion share-swap with Rosneft — the Kremlin-directed energy giant which grabbed back Yukos’s most valuable assets — that will lead to joint offshore exploration in the Russian Arctic.