SCOTTISH oil company Dana Petroleum is managing its Egyptian business remotely from an office near its headquarters in Aberdeen after evacuating eight non-Egyptian managers in the wake of the ousting of president Mohamed Mursi.
Just a small team of expatriate employees, led by managing director for Egypt Paul Barnett, remains in the country.
The move comes as managers at Dana, led by chief executive and former BP executive Marcus Richards, prepare to shop around for new investments to reshape the business whose interests stretch from the Norwegian North Sea to Cameroon.
Dana has been handed $5 billion (£3.3bn) by its state-owned parent Korea National Oil Corporation (KNOC) to invest in existing sites and has a $900 million loan facility to acquire new assets.
A Dana spokesman said: "Dana's primary concern is always the safety and wellbeing of our employees.
"Following recent developments in Egypt we put long-standing plans into action to move eight of our expatriate staff and their families out of Cairo to Aberdeen as a precaution.
"From this safe location they are now able to help run the business remotely. Plans are also in place to secure the safety of our local Egyptian employees should the situation worsen."
Dana is not the only foreign oil company to have removed foreign staff from Egypt. BP said earlier this month it had withdrawn about 60 people, leaving only 40 essential expatriate workers in the country.
BG Group, which usually has about 150 non-Egyptian staff and dependants in Egypt, said it had withdrawn about 100 people.
Royal Dutch Shell has relocated its staff within the country.
Mr Barnett, an oil industry veteran whose experience includes 18 years with oil giant Shell in the Middle East, joined Dana in April. Just weeks afterwards, on July 3, Mr Mursi was ejected from office.
At least 99 people have died in the subsequent violence with demonstrations for and against the military's assumption of power continuing in the Egyptian capital yesterday.
However, hitherto there is little sign that oil and gas production in Egypt, which amounted to 728,00 barrels of oil a day last year and 60.9 billion cubic metres of natural gas, has been affected by the unrest.
The country is attractive to foreign companies because it has proven oil reserves of almost 4.4 billion barrels and, following recent discoveries, increasingly important natural gas reserves totalling around 77 trillion cubic feet.
Nevertheless, Egypt has been an increasingly difficult region for oil companies to operate in, even before the recent instability.
Its government has been delaying payments to foreign oil companies for the oil and gas they produce. It now owes at least $5bn to foreign oil companies, half of which is overdue, according to reports.
Dana's business in Egypt consists of developments in the Gulf of Suez, the Nile Delta and the Western Desert, some of which the company is responsible for operating.
Its portfolio of 17 development leases is currently producing approximately 12,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day (boepd), against total production by the group that totalled 57,284 boepd in 2012.
Dana's portfolio in the UK consists of exploration, production and development activities throughout the Northern, Central and Southern North Sea, West of Shetland, and in the Moray Firth. Average annual production in 2012 was around 33,000 boepd and the company has committed to investing £1bn in the Western Isles project in the Northern North Sea.
Dana was bought by KNOC for £1.87bn in 2010 after a hard-fought hostile takeover waged by the Korean company. This came just months after KNOC was outbid by China's Sinopec for Addax Petroleum, an exploration and production company focused on Africa and the Middle East.
The price for paid for Dana, which refused to open its books to its suitor, was seen as rather rich. However, it met one of KNOC's key aims, which was keen to tap into the expertise that foreign acquisitions could give it.
The focus at the company is now on ramping up production to generate cash and on organising the assets, which include production off the Netherlands and exploration prospects in the Norwegian North Sea. It is also expected to seek to gain more control over assets so it can direct exploration and development to dovetail with company targets.
Dana has been handed $5bn by its Korean parent to invest in existing sites.
It also has a $900m facility provided by an international consortium of bankers, which insiders think could be boosted to as much as $1.2bn if the appropriate deal came along, to finance future purchases.
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