Of 10 oil and gas blocks up for electronic auction Wednesday, there were no bidders on seven and only Ukrainian bidders for three. In the three successful auctions, prices were bid up — from 43% to five times the asking prices. Nikolay Zlochevsky’s Burisma group agreed to pay $925,000 for a lot in Poltava. A unit of Rinat Akhmetov’s DTEK agreed to pay $3.1 million for a Kharkiv block, almost five times the lowest bid. State-owned UkrGazVydobuvannya agreed to pay $1.1 million for another Kharkiv block, three times the starting price. Foreign investors had complained about the lack of insufficient seismic data. They also expressed concerns that Ukraine’s next president could change the rules of the game.
Of 10 oil and gas blocks up for electronic auction Wednesday, there were no bidders on seven and only Ukrainian bidders for three.
