Wintershall Establishes New Board Department in Russia

The top management at Wintershall is acquiring additional support: the Board of Executive Directors of Wintershall Holding GmbH is currently being expanded from four to five board departments and Mario Mehren, currently a division head at Wintershall, will take over the new position from 1.10.2011.

The company’s Russian activities will be transferred from their current board department, “Finance & Russia”, and merged within the new “Russia” board department. The new board department will be based in Moscow. “The expansion of the board to include a special board department for Russia reflects the great importance our Russian activities and cooperation with Gazprom have taken on,” Dr. Rainer Seele, Chairman of the Board of Executive Directors, explained: “I am therefore particularly pleased that a senior manager from within our own ranks, Mario Mehren, has been appointed to this position.”

The 40-year-old graduated in business administration and has been at Wintershall since 2006 as Vice President Finance & Information Management. In this role he worked in the “Finance & Russia” board department under the leadership of Dr. Ties Tiessen. Mehren is already on the supervisory board of Russian Wintershall joint ventures and played a key role in the recent expansion of the cooperation with Gazprom. Before that he worked for BASF for several years, in Ludwigshafen, Schwarzheide and as managing director in Chile. Dr. Ties Tiessen has been on the Wintershall Board of Executive Directors since February 2005. In April 2010 he took over the Finance board department, and the Russian activities of the Wintershall Group at the time were integrated into this department to form “Finance & Russia”.

In addition to Wintershall’s existing shareholdings in Russia – Yuzhno Russkoye, Achimgaz and Wolgodeminoil – and in the Nord Stream Baltic Sea Pipeline, further major projects with Gazprom have been launched recently: its stake in the construction of the offshore section of the South Stream gas pipeline through the Black Sea and the joint development of two additional blocks of the Achimov formation of the west Siberian Urengoy field. As a result of this expansion of the company’s Russian activities, these will now be merged together in a special Russia board department.

Alongside the Chairman of the Board, Dr. Rainer Seele, Martin Bachmann (Exploration & Production), Dr. Ties Tiessen (Finance), Dr. Gerhard König (Natural Gas) and Mario Mehren (Russia) belong to the Wintershall Board.

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Source: Wintershall, August 25, 2011;