MOSCOW, March 30 - RAPSI. The Tyumen Regional Commercial Court has postponed on Friday until April 26 the hearing of BP attorneys' application to compensate legal fees under a lawsuit filed by TNK-BP Holding minority shareholders against the company's board members Peter Charow and Richard Sloan.

BP Exploration Operating Company Limited seeks to recover legal fees connected with the process initiated by TNK-BP Holding minority shareholder Andrei Prokhorov.

Prokhorov has been trying to recover about $17.25 billion from BP and its board members since last August.

The damages have been preliminary assessed at 8-10 million rubles ($273,174-$341,468).

BP does not exclude the further submission of lawsuits by other companies comprising the BP Group and the TNK-BP Holding board members involved in the action.

BP, one of six oil and gas "supermajors," and Rosneft, a leading company in Russia's petroleum industry, agreed to a share swap and the joint development of Russia's Arctic shelf in January. However, the AAR Consortium, representing the Russian TNK-BP shareholders, blocked the execution of the agreement. Further negotiations were terminated in June.

Prokhorov believes that if TNK-BP were a member of the strategic partnership then under the swap agreement, it would have purchased about 1.01 billion common shares in Rosneft, which would have grown in value and brought profit to TNK-BP. Thus, the difference between the current fair price of the shares and the price at which TNK-BP would have acquired the stake as a result of the swap constitutes lost profit, he stresses.

In the opinion of BP Russian Investments Limited and BP plc, the claims are groundless in the absence of any loss inflicting event. TNK-BP could never be a member of a strategic partnership for Arctic shelf development because it has never been regarded as such "due to the non-availability of the required competence," which was publicly stated by Rosneft.

The lawsuit against the board members amounted to 87.112 billion rubles ($2.97 billion) and 409,284 billion rubles ($13.98 billion).