Global commodities trader Trafigura said it has sold its 10% stake in Russia’s major Vostok Oil project in Siberia to a Hong Kong-registered trading firm, Nord Axis.
The Geneva-based firm said the sale was completed on July 12 without disclosing the price. The company said in March it was reviewing its Vostok stake following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which Moscow calls a “special military operation”.
Trafigura bought the non-operational stake in the vast project in December 2020 through a deal that included a long-term oil offtake agreement.
The company said in its 2021 annual report it had completely written down its stake in Vostok after putting an initial 1.5 billion euro ($1.51 billion) of equity cash into the deal, which was later backed up by debt funding to a total of 7 billion euro ($7.05 billion).
Russia’s state-owned oil firm Rosneft Trafigurais leading the project that is comparable in size with the exploration of West Siberia in the 1970s or the U.S. Bakken oil region over the past decade.
It approached other trading firms and sold a 5% to rival trader Vitol and Mercantile & Maritime for $4 billion last year.
