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#5 - JRL 8427 - JRL Home
DEPUTY ECONOMICS MINISTER UPDATES MEDIA ON YUKOS AFFAIR, GAZPROM'S ROSNEFT TAKEOVER BID

MOSCOW, October 25 (RIA Novosti) - The current legal action against the oil major Yukos is going to affect Russia's investment climate, Deputy Economics Minister Andrei Sharonov said at a news conference on the RIA premises Monday.

"The outcome of the Yukos case will affect, this way or another, the investment climate in the Russian Federation," the official pointed out. He noted that Russia's investment climate was important not just in terms of attracting foreign investors, but also in terms of "not scaring off domestic entrepreneurs."

Mr Sharonov also updated the media on Gazprom's plans to make a takeover bid for the oil company Rosneft. There are five banks aspiring to value the deal, all of them foreign, he said, but added that he had no idea of the criteria for selecting the evaluator, nor of the timeframe. He also stopped short of commenting on the recent statement by Alexei Miller, the natural gas giant's chief executive, that the Rosneft takeover deal would be struck by the year's end.

Ivan Materov, Deputy to Russia's Industry and Energy Minister, said earlier that the deal was unlikely to come into effect until mid-2005.

Gazprom has announced that the German bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein will act as a financial advisor for the deal and that it is to value Rosneft's equity and the stake held by the gas major in its subsidiaries.

Gazprom officials have also reported that Deutsche Bank and Citygroup are now conducting separate studies on the planned deal's fairness in terms of its structure and equity evaluation.