Russian LUKoil company has postponed getting of a foreign loan worth about $1 billion, three people familiar with the situation told Bloomberg.
Reuters earlier reported that the oil company has planned to get the loan at the US dollar market. This was the first attempt of the Russian firm to receive money abroad after introduction of sanctions. A source of the agency in one of the banks said in early October that the deal is at the initial stage and the discussion has just started.
Last month LUKoil jointly with four other Russian energy companies has been put on the US sanction list, but the US Department of Finance reported that access to the financial loans has not been limited.
LUKoil has become the only private Russian company, to which the sanctions have been applied and it has no access to the foreign technologies for geological exploration and production in the deep-water projects.
US did not disclose the reasons why the sanctions have been applied to this oil company. Experts of the Financial Times reported that this way the US wanted to show that none of the companies can avoid the sanctions – even if it is not a state company and has no connections with President Vladimir Putin’s close entourage.
* In early October 2014 it was reported that LUKoil Overseas Shah Deniz, daughter of LUKoil Overseas (operator of LUKoil’s foreign production projects), has been negotiating to borrow $1 billion worth credit from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and Asian Development Bank (ADB) to implement the Shah Deniz-2 project.
LUKoil’s total investments into the Shah-Deniz-2 project are estimated at $2,128,000,000.
