Austrian bank issues loan worth $250M to SOCAR Trading

/By Azernews/

By Fatma Babayeva

UniCredit Bank Austria allocated a loan worth $250 million to several companies that are part of SOCAR Trading Group – a trading house of Azerbaijan's state-owned energy company SOCAR, Italian mass media sources reported on June 22.

The provision of the loan envisages shoring up trading activities of the respective companies.

British Norton Rose Fullbright firm acts as a legal advisor for the given deal.

Headquartered in Geneva, SOCAR Trading was incorporated in December 2007 as the trading house of SOCAR with a mandate to market Azerbaijani barrels produced from the Azeri-Chirag-Guneshli field and other surrounding fields in Azerbaijan.

While the company continues to market the bulk of SOCAR crude oil export volumes from Ceyhan port in Turkey, it has also been able to develop significant third party volumes through both leveraging its system barrels, as well as its experienced traders developing new business.

SOCAR Trading's activities cover countries of Europe, Asia and America. Currently, the company keeps expanding customer network. Trade relations with third parties account for 85 percent of the total amount of SOCAR Trading’s revenues.

Recently, SOCAR opened two branches in Canada (Calgary) and the USA (Houston) for pure trading activities of oil and oil products, and will further enter the Latin American market.

In the meantime, SOCAR Trading is strengthening the independence of its subsidiary in Singapore with the recruitment of a CEO specialist sector as well.

UniCredit Bank Austria is the largest bank of the country by having a branch network comprising 300 branch offices in Austria and employing 8,000 people. The bank serves to about 90 percent of large Austrian companies.

Since November 2005, the bank is a member of the UniCredit Group which is responsible for the Central and Eastern European markets.