British-Dutch oil major Royal Dutch Shell will bid for 537 petrol stations belonging to the shattered Yukos oil empire at a bankruptcy auction, the Vedomosti daily reported on May 08.
Shell's subsidiary in Russia could not immediately be reached for comment, but Interfax news agency quoted Shell Russia spokesman Maxim Shub as saying that Shell was generally interested in buying up petrol stations.
Shell "has always considered Russia a strategic market in both upstream and downstream and is always looking for new opportunities for development, including in the petrol station market," Shub said.
Vedomosti said that Shell could be up against state-controlled Russian oil group Rosneft and British-Russian oil major TNK-BP at Thursday's auction.
The starting price is 299.2 million dollars (220.4 million euros). Also on Thursday, a major Yukos production asset, Samaraneftegaz, and a series of refineries are due to be sold off in one of the biggest sales since the auctions began in March.
Yukos was once Russia's largest oil group, and its former CEO, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the richest man in the country. But the group has been attacked in courts for fraud since 2003 and has since been bankrupted.
Critics see a Kremlin-controlled campaign to win back energy assets for state companies and block the political ambitions of Khodorkvosky, who is now serving an eight-year prison sentence in Siberia.