Bailiffs raid Moscow offices of BP unit

31/08/2011 - 9:28

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russian bailiffs raided the Moscow offices of a trading unit of British oil company BP on Wednesday and company sources said most of the staff were told not to come to work.

The bailiffs confirmed the raid but gave no reason for it, one day after state-owned crude producer Rosneft and U.S. oil company ExxonMobil signed an agreement to develop Arctic offshore oil fields.

The deal followed the collapse of an agreement under which BP (BP..LO)would have been Rosneft's foreign partner in the Arctic offshore development project.

"We were ordered to leave the office and work from home," a BP source said.

Russian security forces searched BP's headquarters in Moscow in 2008 during a corporate standoff at TNK-BP, in which the British company has a 50-percent stake.

(Reporting by Dmitry Zhdannikov, Maria Tsvetkova and Vladimir Soldatkin, Writing by Douglas Busvine, Editing by Timothy Heritage)