Oil prices edged higher on Thursday amid rising concerns about supplies from Russia after leading Russian company, Yukos, warned that the imminent threat of bankruptcy could hit its foreign oil sales. US light crude rose 20 cents to $40.78 a barrel, not far off a 21-year peak of $42.45 a barrel set in early June. London Brent crude rose 26 cents to $37.42 a barrel.Yukos said its export operations faced a twin threat from a liquidity crisis and the forced sale of its principal crude oil production unit Yugansk. If Russia’s biggest oil producer failed to raise fresh funds to cover operating costs, it could be forced into bankruptcy by mid-August, it said in a statement. ‘‘One would have to accept that the rising risk of bankruptcy brings with it the rising risk of export disruption,’’ said Commerzbank analyst Steve Turner. Russian courts have ordered the sale of the Yugansk unit to recover $3.4 billion in tax debt. The threat to exports from Russia, the world’s second biggest supplier after Saudi Arabia, comes with global supplies already stretched by strong demand.The Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), which controls about half the world’s exports, will pump at 30.01 million barrels a day in July, consultants petrologistics said.Saudi Arabia, the only world producer with any immediate spare capacity left, already is pumping at 9.5 million bpd, leaving only a million barrels daily spare on the 81 million bpd world market. Worries about US crude inventories emerged again on Wednesday when the US government’s Energy Information Administration said US crude stocks fell by 3.6-million barrels in the week ended July 16, bucking market expectations for a 1.2 million-barrel rise.The decline, largely due to a slowdown in imports from Nigeria, brought national commercial inventories to 299.3 million barrels, 16.1 million barrels above levels a year ago. Strong oil demand this year in the United States and China, where crude oil imports jumped 39 per cent in the first half of 2004, compared with last year, has driven producers to ramp up output leaving little by way of spare capacity.
