Russia wants guarantees from BP that its Russian joint venture, TNK-BP, will not be affected by the costs of cleaning up the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, Russia's ambassador to Britain said Tuesday.
"We want to see how it will work and how this situation will affect the overall strategy of BP and how it may affect … these joint ventures in Russia. We want to have some guarantees it will continue to work," Ambassador Yury Fedotov told reporters in London.
"So far, we are having assurances from BP that in spite of the huge spending on the Gulf of Mexico, still, being a giant company, they may not be very badly affected by this crisis in other parts of the world," he said, speaking in English.
"We have to see how it will look in real life," he added.
Fedotov said 25 percent of all oil extracted by BP worldwide comes from Russia, either directly or through TNK-BP, a 50-50 joint venture with Russia-based partners.
"So Russia is important to BP, but BP is also an important partner for Russia," he said.
Asked about a Financial Times report that BP chief executive Tony Hayward was planning to travel to Moscow for talks with President Dmitry Medvedev, the ambassador said Hayward was quite a regular visitor to Russia and that it would be natural for him to go there again.
In Moscow, a Kremlin official said Medvedev had no meetings planned with Hayward, Bloomberg reported.
Fedotov also confirmed that Medvedev and British Prime Minister David Cameron were trying to organize a bilateral meeting on the sidelines of the G20/G8 summit in Canada later this week, although no date had yet been confirmed.
He could not say at this stage whether the BP issue would be raised in any talks between the two leaders.
Relations between Britain and Russia have been strained since the killing of former security services officer Alexander Litvinenko, a Kremlin critic, in London in 2006. British police have accused State Duma Deputy Andrei Lugovoi in the poisoning death and called for his extradition to face murder charges in London. Russian prosecutors have refused to turn him over.
(Reuters, MT)