Through sale of shares in Polkomtel, PKN Orlen may cash as much as 4 billion PLN
By May 6 investors are to make binding offers to purchase shares in Polkomtel. The finalization of the transaction is impatiently awaited by PKN Orlen, one of the principal shareholders of the Plus network operator. Thanks to that sale Orlen may cash as much as 4 billion Polish Zlotys. It wants to allocate a considerable part of that amount for works connected with gaining access to oil fields. The firm has bet on the Dark Continent. The vision of a not-too-distant mobilization of funds has accelerated the talks.
– By the end of April we plan to hold a series of talks in Egypt. On their basis we’ll make a decision as to who our partner will be and how we’ll engage ourselves in the extraction of oil there. Most of all we are interested in purchasing shares in a company which has its own oil pools. Also acceptable is the purchase of shares in a concrete mining project. For the time being it is still too early to talk about a price – says Wiesław Prugar, the president of Orlen Upstream.
Why does Orlen want to extract oil just in North Africa, a region that is very unstable politically? – Today it is a high-risk country, but this is an advantageous circumstance. One can do shopping there at low prices, banking on the chance that a black scenario regarding the political situation will not materialize – says Grzegorz Pytel, an energy expert at The Sobieski Institute. This is not an isolated opinion, and apart from that experts throw in additional arguments. -The oil and gas reserves in that country are promising, and the pretty good network of pipelines and the nearness of the Suez Canal make their sale easy – itemizes a well-known manager and investor active in the prospecting-and-mining business who wants to remain anonymous. Political instability, however, is not the only risk that there is. – The necessity to collaborate with a national operator in Egypt considerably increases the costs of mining. This applies, for example, to the obligatory employment of a definite number of local workers – emphasizes our latter interlocutor.
Simultaneously Orlen steps up its search for a new management board member who will be responsible for mining-related matters. The contest carried out recently did not make possible selecting an ideal candidate from among the several persons willing to take up the job. However, Maciej Mataczyński, head of the supervisory board, is optimistic: a suitable person will be selected by not later than the end of the first half-year. – The consultancy firm Egon Zehnder presented to us several dozen candidates for that position. We have a ready list of a dozen or so of the best. They are high-class specialists from the Anglo-Saxon world, with huge experience in the mining industry. We count on the new management board member to bring into the company the knowledge of the prospecting-and-mining branch as well as to make a contribution in the form of international contacts – believes Maciej Mataczyński.
Puls Biznesu, p. 1, 2011-04-14, author: Paweł Janas