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By Sophie Sassard and Melissa Akin
LONDON/MOSCOW, May 31 (Reuters) - Banks that helped Russianoil company Rosneft finance its $55 billion buyout ofrival TNK-BP have been left waiting for their payback - a sharein $15 billion in asset sales expected to follow the deal,sources familiar with matter said.
State oil company Rosneft's takeover of TNK-BP this yearaimed to create a major oil group producing more oil than ExxonMobil, but it also tightened the Russian government'sgrip on the country's energy sector.
The asset sales promised by Rosneft Chief Executive IgorSechin would offload less-profitable businesses to turn thecompany into the major oil player the CEO has said he wants itto be. The delay shows Rosneft has a lot on its plateintegrating TNK-BP and that the sales are on the back burner.
Rosneft had dangled the juicy divestment mandates at thebanks in exchange for a $29.8 billion loan - the largest inRussia's history - on good terms, three out of four sources withdirect knowledge of the loan talks said.
"All the lending banks are waiting," said one of the bankerswho asked not to be named because the talks are private.
"We thought (refinancing) bonds and asset sales would kickstart straight after the closing (of TNK-BP deal). We are now inthe dark."
Rosneft declined to comment.
Rosneft's slow motion is frustrating the banks as they wouldearn fat fees from advising the oil giant on the asset salesthis year, which would help boost M&A revenues in an otherwisearid deal making landscape.
M&A activity across all sectors is down 7 percent in Europe,Middle East and Africa since January according to ThomsonReuters data, partly due to the impact of the euro zone crisison business confidence.
M&A PAY-OFF
Banks that maintained big balance sheets throughout thefinancial crisis have been hoping to use this muscle to winlucrative M&A advisory business from rivals which had to shrinkpartly to meet tough European capital rules.
Banks often use their balance sheets to offer cheap loans tocorporate clients to secure higher-margin business such as shareor bond issues or M&A work.
Big balance sheets helped Barclays and DeutscheBank, for example, to achieve number 2 and 3 rankingsin M&A league tables last year, challenging U.S. rival GoldmanSachs, which had the top slot, Thomson Reuters data showed.
Rosneft's jumbo loan raised $16.8 billion in 2012 and $13billion earlier this year to finance the TNK-BP deal with banksincluding Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Barclays, BNP Paribas, Citi, Credit Agricole, JP Morgan, Mizuho, Societe Generale and UniCredit.
Soon after deal closed, Rosneft planned a bond issue torefinance part of the loan. But the company turned instead toRussia's domestic bond market where big Russian banks such asSberbank and VTB dominate.
Rosneft is also doing an M&A deal, but plans to buy a localgas firm rather than sell off some of its own assets.
NO HURRY TO SELL
As a result, the banks' hopes of getting their hands on theasset sales business quickly could be disappointed.
The timing and extent of any disposals were never discussedin depth with the banks and have yet to be approved by theKremlin, all of the sources said.
"These assets are producing on-shore fields, they are bigcash cows. The pressure to sell is not there", said the firstbanker.
"They (Rosneft) have never sold anything, ever. It's not intheir genes." said a second banker, who said Moscow wascurrently reviewing which assets were no longer strategic andcould be sold.
One of the sources, on the Rosneft side, confirmed theparties to the loan talks touched on possible asset sales afterthe closure of the deal but without reference to particularassets or mandates. "It was never discussed in such specifics."
The asset sales are also considered a test of CEO Sechin'sability to get to grips with the Rosneft empire, and re-fashionit into a modern, efficient corporation.
But Sechin, ally of President Vladimir Putin for more than20 years, also is under pressure to ensure that the oil whichunderpins the Russian economy remains safe in trusted hands.
Rosneft's main non-core assets are in Western Siberia, wherethe company pumps most of its crude. Some of these are matureand the company struggles to squeeze out a margin.
A sale of these fields would also mark a reversal in theKremlin's decade-long drive for control of Russia's oil riches.
Western Siberia's fields make up 70 percent of Rosneft'smarket capitalisation, according to one analyst estimate. Theyalso host, deep underground, some of Russia's biggest potentialunconventional resources which are seen as key to mid-termproduction growth.
Potential buyers are therefore expected to be mainly Russiancompanies Lukoil and Gazprom but also someresource-hungry Asian players, the bankers said.
