Riyadh – Mubasher: Apollo Global Management Inc. and Global Infrastructure Partners (GIP) are among suitors that bid for a roughly $10 billion stake in the Saudi Arabian Oil Company’s (Saudi Aramco) oil pipelines, Bloomberg said citing people familiar with the matter.
Canada’s Brookfield Asset Management Inc., BlackRock Inc., sovereign wealth fund China Investment Corp. and Beijing-backed Silk Road Fund Co. have also made non-binding offers and pension funds in Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia have separately submitted initial bids.
The world’s largest oil company is studying the proposals before deciding which companies will be invited to make binding offers and bidders may team up later in the process.
Aramco is considering asset disposals to maintain its $75 billion annual dividend payments, almost all of which go to the Saudi government. The payout, which is the biggest of any listed company in the world, became harder to sustain after the coronavirus pandemic caused crude prices to tumble in 2020.
