The SWP clashed with the Duma

Deputies agreed with the government, but not on everything

Government amendments to the law on the production sharing agreement (PSA) and the corresponding part of the Tax Code, as promised by Deputy Prime Minister Viktor Khristenko, arrived in the State Duma and were considered yesterday at a subcommittee of the budget committee. As expected, the people's deputies generally supported the position of the Cabinet of Ministers on the issue of applying this regime, however, the deputies decided to exclude several fields that the government itself proposed to sell under PSA terms.

Recently, the government has made a lot of efforts to significantly limit the number of fields that can be developed under the PSA regime. At the same time, the country's leadership took an intermediate position between the point of view of supporters and opponents of the use of this regime. Thus, YUKOS believes that the PSA regime should be used only in the most extreme cases. According to representatives of this oil company, the field can be transferred to the number of projects developed under the terms of a PSA if it was previously put up for auction and there were no people willing to purchase a license to operate under the normal tax regime. In turn, representatives of the state-owned Rosneft have repeatedly spoken out in favor of maintaining the PSA, which is understandable: the company has quite a lot of projects that are included in the list of 28 fields potentially intended for development under PSA terms. In any case, the company believed that it was necessary to preserve the already accepted list.

As a result, the government introduced amendments to the Duma according to which the field can be developed under a PSA only if it was not sold at a preliminary auction on normal terms. At the same time, the cabinet of ministers did not forget about the interests of the state-owned Rosneft. Thus, Anatoly Aksakov, deputy head of the People's Deputy parliamentary group, told the AK&M agency yesterday that the government insists that the auction regime on a general basis should not be applied to the Shtokman gas condensate field: the Cabinet of Ministers is initially convinced that it should be developed only on the terms of a PSA.

Elena Dyachkova, a member of the State Duma expert council on taxation, told the Vremya Novostey newspaper that the government also insisted that fields on the continental shelf and those subsoil areas developed under international agreements providing for the application of the regime be developed under the terms of a PSA without a preliminary auction. PSA. However, as Ms. Dyachkova reported, the deputies did not support the government’s initiative to provide a PSA regime without a preliminary auction for offshore fields and “overwhelmingly” voted for licenses for the development of these subsoil areas to be sold on a general basis. As for the deposits that should be developed under interstate agreements, the deputies agreed with the opinion of the Cabinet of Ministers. At the same time, as Ms. Dyachkova reported, “no one objected to the Shtokman field being developed under the PSA regime, as proposed by the government.” The same applies to projects in the Caspian Sea in which LUKOIL participates. However, the people's representatives did not agree that the Prirazlomnoye field (a project of Rosneft and Gazprom) and the Kirinsky block (the Sakhalin-3 project, in which Rosneft also participates) should be developed under the terms of a PSA. It is expected that the second reading of government amendments in the State Duma will take place at the end of April.

Denis REBROV