Tuesday March 1 at the microphone of franceinfo, Bruno Le Maire the Minister of the Economy, mentioned: “A problem of principle to work with relatives of Russian power.” In Russia, TotalEnergies is a shareholder with almost 20% of the Russian gas giant Novateck, a company chaired by a billionaire close to the Kremlin. And the group also holds several stakes in several projects in Russia.
After the intervention of Bruno Le Maire, Patrick Pouyanné, the boss of TotalEnergies publicly condemned Vladimir Putin’s military aggression in Ukraine but he was careful not to announce a departure from Russia. He stuck to saying that the group would no longer invest in new projects in the country. If Bruno Le Maire and Patrick Pouyanné saw each other on Tuesday afternoon, the interview did not convince the CEO to leave Russia. For now, TotalEnergies seeks to spare the goat and the cabbage.
And for good reason: there are too many interests at stake. Russia is vital today for the French group. It is its largest subsidiary, ahead of Norway, Nigeria and Angola. On its own, it concentrates a quarter of the reserves of TotalEnergies in hydrocarbons. The group has invested billions of euros in recent years in gigantic projects, such as the Yamal gas project in the Russian Far North, which has been running at full speed for five years.
TotalEnergies is also a shareholder in Artic, another project whose first delivery of liquefied natural gas, LNG, is scheduled for next year. If the firm leaves now, it would be wasted money, with no return on investment. And then, it is not at all the culture of the company to leave quickly, following geopolitical tensions, or for fear of seeing its reputation damaged: the giant is still in Yemen, in Iraq. In Burma, the group took 20 years to leave the country.
ExxonMobil, BP and Shell, Anglo-Saxon groups, have announced their departure, but things are a bit different. BP and Shell, for example, had already been on the verge of exiting Russia for four or five years. The investments made were amortized. In any case, these departure announcements caused the share price to fall. TotalEnergies which remains a 100% private company is therefore also careful to protect the interests of its shareholders. We have to see how the situation will evolve, but according to experts, Total will only leave Russia if there are very strong economic sanctions and legal risks. That is to say forced and forced…