Austria's OMV oil group, the majority shareholder in Romania's largest oil company Petrom, on Monday took Hungary's MOL by surprise, with the Hungarian company finding out from the press about the sale of the 21.2% stake for 1.4bn euros to Russia's Surgutneftegaz.
The announcement was completely unexpected particularly because a week before OMV's representatives had given reassurances that they were not considering giving up this stake until the end of 2009. In the wake of this deal, the Russian company becomes the strongest shareholder of MOL, with the rest of shareholders largely owning stakes below 10%. In Romania, Russian companies after this deal come to indirectly control over 35% in fuel distribution, given that Lukoil Romania controls a 25% share, while MOL Romania had 10.7% of the market at the end of 2008. Even after this deal, Petrom is still the biggest player, accounting for 36% of the oil product retail.
The representatives of Surgutneftegaz, Russia's fourth largest oil and gas company, with turnover worth around 23bn dollars in 2007 and a market capitalisation of 17.2bn dollars, much higher than MOL's or OMV's, were quoted as saying by Bloomberg, that they did not know whether they would make further acquisitions to reach a majority stake in MOL group or not. Surgutneftegaz is one of the least transparent Russian companies.
Bloomberg says Surgutneftegaz is sitting on a pile of cash, around 20bn dollars, which would virtually allow it to purchase further MOL stock or further companies.
OMV, central Europe's biggest oil company, dropped a 2.8 trillion-forint (12 billion dollar) takeover bid for MOL, Hungary's largest refiner, in August 2008 after the EU expressed competition concerns over the proposed acquisition.
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