Austria's ex-finance minister nominated for OMV supervisory board

VIENNA (Reuters) - Austria's former-finance minister Hans Joerg Schelling has been nominated to serve as a member of the supervisory board at OMV, the oil and gas group said on Thursday.

Schelling, a member of Chancellor Sebastian Kurz's conservatives, served as finance minister in the previous government until December 2017. Last year, he agreed to work as an adviser for the Russian-lead Nord Stream 2 pipeline project, of which OMV is a financing partner.

Austria holds 31.5 percent in the country's largest listed company via state holding OeBAG and Abu Dhabi state investor Mubadala is a second core shareholder with 24.9 percent.

Nine of OMV's 15 supervisory board mandates must be reassigned at the annual shareholder meeting on May 14. Eight contracts expire and the current board chair, former Siemens chief executive Peter Loescher has also decided to step down.

OeBAG boss Thomas Schmid and the chief executives of Vienna Insurance, Elisabeth Stadler, and Lenzing, Stefan Doboczky, are also nominated as new candidates for the supervisory board, OMV said on its website.

As a finance minister, Schelling supported OMV in its negotiations on an asset swap with Gazprom and in 2016 took part in the ceremony, in which OMV agreed to exchange a stake in its Norwegian business for a stake in the Russian group's Achimov oil and gas exploration blocks.

The deal was abandoned last year due to opposition from Norway. OMV said at the time that it would buy the Siberian assets instead of swapping them.

There is still no deal and OMV CEO Rainer Seele has said he expects the price negotiations to drag on until summer after he had initially guided for an agreement in early 2019.

(Reporting by Kirsti Knolle. Editing by Jane Merriman)

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