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MOSCOW (MRC) -- South Africa’s
competition watchdog approved Glencore’sroughly USD900 million bid for Chevron’s
local and Botswana assets on Thursday, bolstering its chances of scuppering a
rival bid from China’s Sinopec, reported Reuters.
Chevron agreed last year to
sell its stake to state-owned Sinopec before miner and commodities trader
Glencore swooped in after reaching a deal with minority shareholders, who backed
it and exercised preemptive rights on the sale.
At stake is a 75 percent
share in Chevron’s South African subsidiary that runs a 100,000-barrels-per-day
oil refinery in Cape Town, a lubricants plant in Durban and 820 petrol stations
and other oil storage facilities.
The sale also includes 220 convenience
stores across South Africa and Botswana.
For Glencore, the deal would
secure the trader’s first refining asset since it ventured into downstream
investments. For Sinopec, it would mark its second major refinery investment as
the company looks to expand overseas amid a saturated home market.
Both
deals have now been given the green light from the Competition Commission
subject to several conditions that include the preservation of jobs after the
deal.
It is now up to the Competition Tribunal, which makes the final
ruling on deals, to decide whether to accept the Commission’s recommendations.
The Tribunal has already approved Sinopec’s bid.
As MRC informed earlier,
in July 2016, USD36.8bn expansion of the Tengiz oilfield in Kazakhstan, the
largest investment by private sector oil companies this decade, was given
the go-ahead by Chevron of the US, bucking the trend of delays and cancellations
resulting from the slump in crude prices since mid-2014.
Chevron
Corporation is an American multinational energy corporation. One of the
successor companies of Standard Oil, it is headquartered in San Ramon,
California, and active in more than 180 countries. Chevron is engaged in every
aspect of the oil, natural gas, and geothermal energy industries, including
hydrocarbon exploration and production; refining, marketing and transport;
chemicals manufacturing and sales; and power generation. |
