Saturday 14 October 2006
Japan’s leading corporations fully endorse the idea of Russia’s Gazprom giant joining the Sakhalin 2 project. A statement to this effect has just been made by representatives of Mitsui and Mitsubishi companies both of which have a stake in the joint venture to extract oil and gas of Russia’s Far Eastern island of Sakhalin.
According to Japanese media reports. Mitsui and Mitsubishi could respectively sell 3 and 2 percent of their stakes in the Sakhalin 2 project to Russia’s gas monopoly. Gazprom, for its part, is now in talks to acquire a 20% stake in the project’s biggest shareholder Royal Dutch Shell in exchange for giving the Anglo-Dutch giant a share in another major project in Russia. If Gazprom has its way, it could accumulate a 25% stake and become the second biggest shareholder in the Sakhalin 2 project after Shell.