MOSCOW (MRC) -- The heads of Japanese oil refiners Idemitsu Kosan Co. and Showa Shell Sekiyu met last Thursday to re-confirm the companies' intention to merge despite opposition from Idemitsu's founding family, an Idemitsu spokesman said, reported Hydrocarbonprocessing.
The Nikkei business daily reported Friday that Idemitsu was considering acquiring a smaller stake in Showa Shell than planned to counter efforts by its founding family to block a merger of the two oil refiners.
The Idemitsu spokesman said it was not true that a decision had been made on any specific plan, and that a variety of options were under consideration for the planned merger.
As MRC informed earlier, last week, the founding family of Japan's Idemitsu Kosan Co. bought a stake in Showa Shell Sekiyu KK, in a bid to block Idemitsu management's billion-dollar plan to take over the rival oil refiner, the family's lawyer said Wednesday. The family said differing corporate cultures preclude any synergy from a merger. In its latest effort to dissuade management, the family bought 0.1% of Showa Shell.
Earlier this year, in April, Japanese refiner Idemitsu Kosan Co. and smaller rival Showa Shell Sekiyu announced that they would merge on April 1 next year. Japan's No.2 and No.5 refiners by revenue agreed last November in a deal worth approximately USD4 B to create the nation's second-biggest refiner sometime between October 2016 and April 2017.
Royal Dutch Shell plc is an Anglo-Dutch multinational oil and gas company headquartered in The Hague, Netherlands and with its registered office in London, United Kingdom. It is the biggest company in the world in terms of revenue and one of the six oil and gas "supermajors". Shell is vertically integrated and is active in every area of the oil and gas industry, including exploration and production, refining, distribution and marketing, petrochemicals, power generation and trading.
Idemitsu Kosan is a Japanese petroleum company. It owns and operates oil platforms, refineries and produces and sells petroleum, oils and petrochemical products. The company runs two petrochemical plants in Chiba and Tokuyama. The two naphtha crackers can produce up to 997,000 tonnes of ethylene per year.
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