LONDON - BP said on Monday that it was in advanced talks with the Russian state oil company Rosneft about the sale of its 50 percent stake in TNK-BP, the British energy giant's Russian affiliate.
The BP statement, which said no agreement had yet been reached, is the first official announcement from the London-based oil company after several days of speculation that it was close to selling its stake in TNK-BP to Rosneft.
Although the BP board is said to have approved the deal, a person with direct knowledge of the matter said that there were “a few local issues†to iron out in Russia before an announcement could be made. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because the deal is still being negotiated.
The same person said that BP's board, which met in London on Friday, has given Robert W. Dudley, BP's chief executive, authorization to negotiate the final terms for BP's sale of its Russian holdings.
Under an offer proposed on Thursday, Rosnef t would pay up to $28 billion in cash and shares for the TNK-BP holding. The person said that it was likely that BP would gain at least one seat on Rosneft's board.
Although the TNK-BP investment has been marred by fighting between BP and its Russian partners, the operations have been enormously profitable, earning $19 billion in dividends for BP since 2003 as the company helped improve operations at the Russian affiliate through sharing technology and management skills.
Under the terms of the deal, BP would remain in Russia but - initially at least - only as a minority investor in an oil company controlled by the government of Russian President Vladimir V. Putin. Later, BP is hoping to use this new strategic tie with the Kremlin to secure other business in the country.
Mr. Dudley, a Mississippian, took over in the midst of the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster and decided that BP should put its global business on a new footing by selling older, less profitable f ields and concentrating on exploration.
BP has sold assets in countries from Venezuela to Vietnam. It recently agreed to sell its Texas City, Texas refinery for $2.5 billion to Marathon Petroleum. That sale brought the value of divestments agreed to by BP since the beginning of 2010 to more than $35 billion.
The Russian holdings are the largest of the mature businesses that remain a potential candidate for Mr. Dudley's sales.
They are comprised mostly of aging oil fields in Siberia with little potential for new output, according to BP executives. Some analysts, including Thane Gustafson of the consulting firm I.H.S. Cera, however, believe that TNK-BP has the potential for participating in a coming oil production boom in Western Siberia.
Currently, TNK-BP's output counts for about 25 percent of BP's global production, or roughly as much oil as BP pumps in the United States, including Alaska.
For the Russian industry, the buyout of BP's share in T NK-BP takes a large portion of the industry full circle back to state ownership. Rosneft's chief executive, Igor I. Sechin, a former military intelligence officer and close aide to the Russian president is a proponent of greater state ownership in the oil industry.
TNK-BP is the third-largest Russian oil company, after Rosneft and Lukoil. If Rosneft buys out both BP and the handful of Russian billionaires who control the other half of TNK-BP, Rosneft will become the world's largest publicly traded oil company, with production of about 4.5 million barrels a day.
‘‘We have seen this remarkable strengthening of the influence of Rosneft and Sechin personally,'' said John Lough, a former TNK-BP executive who is a Russia specialist at Chatham House, a British research organization.
‘‘At the moment, the way the Russian system works is by achieving a distribution of influence and access to rents'' - or windfall profits - ‘‘to achieve overall equilibrium on which the state is based,'' he said. ‘‘Sechin's apparent strengthening of influence could come at the cost of maintaining that balance. It could upset the apple cart.''
