Emirates National Oil Company (Enoc) on Tuesday said its chief executive would be the new chief executive of Dragon Oil, which Enoc acquired fully in 2015 as a key plank in its diversification strategy.
Saif Al Falasi takes over with immediate effect from Abdul Al Khalifa, who had been head of Dragon Oil since 2008, Enoc, which is owned by the Dubai government, said in a statement.
Mr Al Falasi takes over at a time when Dragon Oil “continues on its path to accelerate the development of the Cheleken Contract Area, pursue opportunities for gas monetisation and explore value-enhancing acquisitions within its diversification strategy”.
In September 2015, Enoc bought out the 46 per cent of Dragon Oil that it did not already own after a prolonged wooing of minority shareholders that required it to pay a 57 per cent premium to the share price at the time of the original offer six months earlier.
The deal valued Dragon at about £4 billion (Dh17.85bn) when it was bought out and delisted from the London and Irish stock exchanges.
Dragon Oil’s main asset is the Cheleken offshore oil and gasfields in Turkmenistan, where it is sole operator under a production-sharing agreement with the government. It has invested more than US$5bn over the past decade-and-a-half to reach production levels of about 100,000 barrels per day by the end of 2015.
The company also has interests in exploration assets in Iraq, Algeria, Tunisia, Afghanistan and Egypt.
The Dubai government’s aim in taking full control of the company was to use Dragon Oil as a vehicle to diversify the emirate’s upstream oil and gas assets for energy security purposes, among others.
“The addition of an upstream arm to Enoc is important not only for the future of the group but for the emirate of Dubai as a whole,” the company said in on Tuesday’s statement. “Enoc is now a vertically integrated oil and gas business that is well positioned to strengthen the nation’s energy security.”
Dragon Oil has been developing a gas treatment plant at Cheleken to be able to strip condensate and ship it for export.
The company hasn’t yet made any significant upstream acquisitions. Before it was bought out, Dragon Oil struggled to diversify and had to abandon a £492 million bid for Petroceltic, an exploration and development company based in Dublin, Ireland, when oil prices collapsed in 2014.
Enoc was founded 24 years ago and has dozens of subsidiaries, including refining at Jebel Ali free zone, which it is expanding significantly, and retail stations throughout Dubai and Saudi Arabia.
Mr Al Khalifa, the outgoing chief executive, had been a long-serving executive at Saudi Aramco before taking over at Dragon Oil in 2008.
amcauley@thenational.ae
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