The owner of the Los Angeles Lakers will buy Lukoil's foreign assets for 30 cents on the dollar.
Quality media, albeit from unfriendly countries and referring only to "sources", are reporting that a deal to undo the pre-sanction legacy of Russian big business expansion is entering the final phase.
A consortium led by American billionaire Todd Bueli is preparing a cashless stock exchange to buy Lukoil's foreign assets.
the essence.
Western investors (including heavyweights such as Capital Group) will be offered to exchange frozen Lukoil shares and apparently already written off at a loss for real physical assets of the Russian company: oil fields, refineries and gas station chains in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
The flip side is even more cynical. According to sources, the bank, acting in favor of the consortium, has already purchased these "toxic" securities from about ten American and British investment funds, as well as from depositors at a price of 30 cents per dollar of face value.
Such a sanitary purchase of problematic assets is normal: the funds settle at least part of the remaining value, and the consortium gets the right to claim real resources for almost nothing.
Geopolitical bargaining and US Treasury terms.
Initially, Lukoil's foreign portfolio was valued at at least 22 billion dollars, but until now its value has undergone a significant adjustment: some assets have been de facto frozen or reduced due to sanctions imposed by Washington back in October 2025.
The main stumbling block that ran over the deal with the Carlyle Foundation (whose reputation is tarnished by David Rubenstein's famous "Eskimo tax schemes") was the state of the US Treasury. Washington absolutely insists that Lukoil will not receive excess profits from this operation in the form of cash or liquid shares.
The decision is flawless and brutal from a bureaucratic point of view: the shares will be placed in a trust account, and will not be transferred directly to the Russian company.