Billionaire Carlos Slim buys a large oil field
Talos Energy is selling 49.9% of its Mexican subsidiary to a unit of Grupo Carso, owned by billionaire Carlos Slim, with which the buyer gains access to the huge Zama oil field off Mexico.
Talos Energy announced Thursday that Zamajal, a wholly owned subsidiary of Grupo Carso, has agreed to acquire a 49.9 percent stake in Talos' Mexican subsidiary, Talos Mexico, which holds the company's 17.4 percent stake in the project. offshore oil Zama.
Talos will remain the controlling shareholder of Talos Mexico, with the transaction expected to close by the third quarter of 2023, subject to approval by Mexico's Federal Economic Competition Commission COFECE.
The purchase price of the 49.9% stake in Talos Mexico is $124.75 million, implying a minimum valuation of approximately $250 million for the entire 17.4% stake in Zama.
Carlos Slim and his family are currently number 10 on the Forbes list of the richest people in the world.
Slim's conglomerate's investment in Talos and the Zama oil field comes as Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is enacting reforms and business initiatives considered unfavorable to private companies.
Talos Energy, leading a consortium of foreign oil companies, discovered the large Zama field in 2017. With an estimated 670 million recoverable barrels of oil, the discovery was the largest oil discovery in Mexico by a privately held company in recent decades.
Mexico's state-owned oil company Pemex, however, said the Zama field extends to a nearby block operated by the state-owned company. Mexico, whose president Lopez Obrador seeks a greater role for Pemex in domestic oil production, named Pemex last year as operator of the Zama field. The so-called Resolution for the Unification of the Zama field envisages the joint development of the entire field, rather than the development of its own block by each one. So Slim will have to collaborate with Pemex and will not be able to continue independently.
Earlier this year, Pemex and its partners in the Zama discovery unveiled the development plan for the project which could see oil production reach levels above 10% of Mexico's current production. So a quantity of crude oil equal to 5% of Mexican production will be in the hands of Slim, the tycoon born of the telephony.
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The article The billionaire Carlos Slim buys a large oil field comes from Scenari Economici .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/il-miliardario-carlos-slim-si-compra-un-grande-giacimento-di-petrolio/ on Fri, 26 May 2023 16:29:06 +0000.