BP has said it is selling assets in the U.S., Canada and Egypt to Apache Corp. for $7 billion to help pay the costs from the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
Some or all of the proceeds will go towards a $20 billion fund that BP agreed to last month under pressure from the Obama administration. The fund will help pay cleanup costs and damages from the spill.
As the spill escalated in the weeks after the explosion of the BP-operated rig Deepwater Horizon, BP realised it needed to bolster its available cash. The company suspended dividend payments of about $10.6 billion for this year. And it said it would speed up plans to sell $10 billion in assets. Apache eventually emerged as a potential buyer.
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BP has spent about $4 billion so far on containing and cleaning up the oil, as well as on damage claims from Gulf businesses.
BP Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg, while not identifying other properties for sale, on Tuesday said BP's board “believes that there are opportunities to divest assets which are strategically more valuable to other parties than they are to BP.”