A thought from the Twittersphere.
If BP, Shell and the rest are going to struggle to find buyers for their Russian assets, 20% of Rosneft in BP’s case, then how about this:
Gift the assets to a trust that can be used to pay for rebuilding Ukraine once the war ends.
This sounds like a good idea, if one that is probably far harder to enact in practice than it might sound.
On the face of it this plan offers several advantages. For a start it means BP and the rest don’t have to dump assets on the cheap, they can actively try and manage them to be profitable.
Since at the moment, they can’t sell anyway, saying the assets will go to victims of the war gives them breathing space.
It also allows them to avoid the possibility later that they were seen to profit from being involved with a regime that is going to be an international pariah for years, perhaps decades.
This possibility extends far beyond big oil.
Abrdn, one of our biggest fund managers, has about £2 billion worth of Russian assets. The company is keen to point out that this is a tiny portion of its total assets – indeed it is far less than investors withdrew from the company in the last year.
But if it is insignificant to Abrdn, it would be valuable to Ukraine.
Wouldn’t is also be a wonderful riposte to Vladimir Putin and his fellow crooks – that chunks of the money invested in Russia before its reckless war go to the people it bombed afterwards.
Big institutions would have to agree to write-off their own investments, of course, but since they are basically doing that already that doesn’t seem problematic.
Why wouldn’t this work?
