US allows negotiations on Lukoil’s foreign assets until January 17

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Dec 10 (Reuters) – The United States on Wednesday extended a deadline for negotiations on buying the global assets of Russian oil company Lukoil by a little over a month to January 17.

President Donald Trump imposed sanctions on Lukoil and Rosneft, Russia’s two biggest energy companies, on October 22 as part of an effort to pressure Moscow over its war in Ukraine, and Lukoil put its assets up for sale shortly after.

The company’s global assets – which include oil fields, refineries, and a network of retail gas stations – are worth about $22 billion and have drawn interest from a wide variety of entities including U.S. private equity firm Carlyle Group and U.S. oil major Chevron.

The extension of the general license issued by the U.S. Treasury also allows interested parties to enter into contingent contracts for the sale of the assets and the wind-down of related work on them.

U.S. investment bank Xtellus Partners, meanwhile, has proposed to the U.S. Treasury that proceeds from the sale of Lukoil’s foreign assets be used to repay American investors who lost money when Russia’s war in Ukraine froze their Lukoil stock holdings, Reuters previously reported, citing sources.

Western investors held over a quarter of Lukoil stock before the war began.

The U.S. Treasury Department has not commented on the proposal.

Lukoil has been hard-hit by the U.S. sanctions, with overseas operations disrupted from Iraq to Finland. The company had asked for an extension of the negotiations deadline so that it has more time to work on deals, sources had told Reuters.

(Reporting by Timothy Gardner in Washington and Costas Pitas in Los Angeles; Editing by Doina Chiacu, Nick Zieminski and Matthew Lewis)