TNK-BP drops legal claim against BP

MOSCOW, Oct. 25 (UPI) -- TNK-BP, a Russian joint venture with BP, scrapped a multibillion-dollar claim against BP a day before the British company said its profits rose.

Board members at TNK-BP opted against a compensation claim for losses allegedly incurred when a January deal between BP and Russia's Rosneft collapsed.

A proposed deal between BP and Rosneft for work in the arctic collapsed after TNK-BP said it violated terms of its shareholder agreement with BP. Rosneft later landed a similar deal with U.S. supermajor Exxon Mobil.

A court ruled last week that TNK-BP minority shareholder Andrei Prokhorov wasn't allowed to have more time to get support from the 1 percent of the TNK-BP shareholders needed to go ahead with the suit. TNK-BP said it was abandoning the claim as it sought better ties with its British counterparts, British newspaper The Daily Telegraph reports.

BP, meanwhile, agreed to keep Mikhail Fridman on board as chief executor at TNK-BP as his successor Maxim Barsky heads toward the door. Bob Dudley, chief executive at BP, left his office at TNK-BP when he served as chief there in 2008 because of the acrimonious relationship between the two energy companies.

Dudley was expected to face shareholder pressure ahead of its third quarter earnings reports. BP, in a statement Tuesday, said profits for the three months ending Sept. 30 were up from $1.79 billion for the same period in 2010 to $4.91 billion.

BP has struggled to recover from debts tied to last year's Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The British company won recent approval from the U.S. government to restart work in the gulf.