No, ConocoPhillips is not suing itself

Another Courthouse News Service piece looks at the dispute between ConocoPhillips and Venezuela from ConocoPhillips' point of view. It begins as follows:

Venezuela's national oil company is selling CITGO to move the money back home and prevent ConocoPhillips from collecting an impending billion-dollar arbitration award, ConocoPhillips claims in court.

So who's reportedly buying CITGO?

CITGO is shopping its assets to energy heavyweights Valero, Chevron, Marathon and Phillips 66

Uh, wait a minute. Isn't Phillips 66 by definition part of ConocoPhillips? So if Phillips 66 buys CITGO, does ConocoPhillips have to sue itself?

No. It turns out that Phillips 66 was spun off from ConocoPhillips and is now an independent company. So the former family members are now separated.

I've run across this myself; after my current company was sold by Motorola, there were obviously questions about why we were using Motorola hardware devices (although those hardware devices have also been spun off by Motorola).

And sometimes it happens the other way. Years ago I was hearing a sales pitch from a company - I won't mention the name of the company, but they like yachts and the color red a lot - and the company salespeople were telling us to buy one of the company's products, and not to buy Product X from a competitor because it was inferior.

Well, next thing you know, this particular company acquired the provider of Product X. (The company also likes acquisitions.)

In my next encounter with the salespeople, they were suddenly singing Product X's praises and saying that it was obviously the superior product.

What have you done for me lately?



P.S. If you couldn't figure out the acquisition deal involving the red yacht-loving company, it's this one. And if I had followed the ORIGINAL sales advice, I would have had to do a migration later.