Russian billionaire Mikhail Fridman has officially stepped down as CEO of the Russian-British joint venture TNK-BP, the company said on Monday.
“Mikhail Fridman has stepped down from his position as chairman of the management board of TNK-BP management and chief executive officer of TNK-BP. The authority of M. Fridman, based on powers of attorney, has been delegated to the company’s management who will continue to run TNK-BP on a daily basis,” the company said in a statement.
Fridman, a member of AAR consortium, which represents the four billionaires of Russian origin who own half of TNK-BP, resigned as TNK-BP CEO in late May due to the collapse of corporate management.
BP and the Russian partners in the AAR consortium have been locked in a long-running dispute over management of their Russian joint venture, which included the replacement of the former TNK-BP CEO Robert Dudley in 2008.
That conflict, which went on for three months and ended with Dudley resigning and leaving Russia, was followed by another divide over whether BP was entitled to participate in a joint venture with Russia’s biggest crude producer, Rosneft, to explore and develop Russia’s Arctic shelf deposits.