Millions in Yukos Debt Acquired

MOSCOW, March 15 — The Russian state oil company Rosneft has acquired $482 million in debt that the troubled oil company Yukos owed to Western banks, Yukos said Wednesday. The step raised the possibility that Rosneft might acquire Yukos's remaining assets.

In a statement on its Web site, Yukos said it appeared that Rosneft acquired the debt in December.

Neither Rosneft nor the Western banks confirmed the sale. A spokesman for Rosneft could not be reached late Wednesday.

Rosneft has already acquired Yukos's richest oil fields and with Yukos in official disfavor and teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, energy analysts speculated that Rosneft might gain possession of at least some of the Yukos assets used as collateral on the debt.

But Rosneft denied as recently as Monday that it was interested in acquiring the rest of Yukos, and some analysts said the purchase of the debt might be an attempt by Rosneft to clean up its books before an initial public stock offering it plans later this year.

"Rosneft wants to make its debt structure as clean as possible and remove any uncertainties ahead of its I.P.O.," Chris Weafer, chief strategist at Alfa Bank in Moscow, told Bloomberg News. "It also puts Rosneft in a better position for assets that may be shaken from Yukos under bankruptcy."

A consortium of 14 Western banks, including Deutsche Bank, ING, Citigroup and BNP Paribas, filed suit in Moscow on Friday to have Yukos declared bankrupt. Yukos also faces tax claims and other lawsuits.

Rosneft, a second-tier producer in the 1990's, became a major oil company when rich fields in western Siberia were seized from Yukos by Russian tax authorities in a politically charged case in 2004. Yukos's former chairman, Mikhail B. Khodorkovsky, is serving an eight-year sentence in a Siberian penal colony after conviction on fraud, embezzlement and tax-evasion charges.

Rosneft hopes to raise $20 billion on Russian and foreign exchanges from its stock offering. The Kremlin intends to retain 51 percent of the company.

Oil analysts in Moscow have said that what remains of Yukos is ripe for a takeover by the state. But Rosneft executives and managers dismissed the prospect of a takeover at a presentation on Monday related to the prospective stock offering.

Asked whether his company intended to acquire the remnants of Yukos, a vice president, Sergei I. Kudryashov, said: "These assets are not for sale. For now, we are working on our own assets."

The New York Times