Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Indian companies place $5 billion bid on Conoco assets. Or maybe not.


An update on this article in July, a bunch of sources are reporting that an Indian consortium has finally placed a bid on some of ConocoPhillips' assets, including Surmont, but excluding its JVs with Cenovus, Christina Lake and Foster Creek. The Indian companies in the consortium are Oil India, India Oil (just to be confusing) and Oil and Natural Gas Company Overseas (ONGC Videsh). There is disagreement over the price they offered, however, with people saying they don't think it's worth $5 billion and ONGC apparently denying it yesterday, with their chairman saying "I can categorically say that we have not made a bid yet for the $5 billion deal". That sounds pretty categorical.


No word yet of political backlash against the deal in Canada. I suppose the US might also weigh in, since Conoco is an American company. Indian companies have been keen to get into the oilsands for some time, but every time it's considering things it seems to get beaten to the punch, or outbid, by Chinese companies. I guess since its been three months since this exact deal was first reported to the press, and four months since news that some Indian companies were looking at Conoco, I don't find that too hard to believe.

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