Putin meets foreign executives on energy

RUSSIA: Prime Minister Vladimir Putin will meet Thursday with foreign executives in Russia's northern Yamal Peninsula for talks on exploiting the region's abundant but hard-to-access gas resources.

The meeting in the remote Arctic town of Salekhard, about 2,000 kilometers (1,240 miles) northeast of Moscow, will focus on exploration in the region, Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov told AFP on Wednesday.

"In Salekhard, he will chair a meeting of interested Russian companies engaged in the area but also international firms, both energy producers and consumers," Peskov said.

"Russia is quite open to international investment and has a rich history of cooperation with foreign participants in the energy sphere," he added. Officials did not specify which foreign energy firms had been invited to the meeting, which will include Russia's state-run energy giant Gazprom as well as other local oil and gas companies.

But the Vedomosti daily reported that invitations had gone out to Norway's StatoilHydro, British-Dutch oil major Shell, France's Total and GDF-Suez, US firms ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips, Japan's Mitsui and Mitsubishi, Germany's E.ON, Korea's Kogas, Malaysia's Petronas and Canada's Suncor.

Gazprom, the world's largest gas producer and a key supplier to the European Union, hopes to tap the vast deposits on Yamal as output steadily declines at its flagship Siberian fields. Moscow, Thursday, AFP