The Poles will not take the Yukos inheritance

Warsaw fears energy blackmail

There are rumors in Poland about the possible resignation of the chairman of the board of the Polish oil company Orlen, Igor Chalupets. This may affect the company's acquisition of the Mazeikiai Nafta refinery located in Lithuania. For a long time, this enterprise was the object of interests of Russian oil companies, and in recent years it was managed by Yukos. On May 26, 2006, the Polish oil concern PKN Orlen signed an agreement to purchase 53.7% of the shares of Mazeikiai Nafta from one of the Yukos subsidiaries registered in the Netherlands for $1.492 billion. “At the same time, we began a process whose goal is to purchase 30.66% of the shares of Mazeikiai Nafta owned by the Lithuanian government,” Chalupets said at the same time, noting that the purchase of these shares will allow Orlen to operate in the markets not only of Poland, Czech Republic and Germany, but also the Baltic countries, where Mazeikiai Nafta satisfies the bulk of the demand for fuel.”

In Poland and Lithuania they do not hide that one of the main motives for the sale of the Lithuanian plant to a Polish company was to limit the ability of Russian companies to influence prices on the regional fuel market. The Polish understanding of energy security, to put it mildly, does not quite coincide with the Russian one. “We are trying to diversify energy sources, looking for them outside Russia and at the same time supporting the construction of pipelines bypassing Russia,” Witold Waszczykowski, Deputy State Secretary of the Polish Foreign Ministry, explained to Vremya Novostey. - This is not connected with any hostility towards Russia. We just want to feel safe and not depend on anyone.”

However, local analysts see the roots of Chalupets' possible resignation not in the problems surrounding Lithuania, but in pressure from a government agency - the Polish Ministry of Finance. As Lithuanian radio reported the other day with reference to the Polish Gazeta Pravna, Polish experts attribute the resignation to the fact that Orlen is the only company of this scale that remains under the partial control of the Polish government. And therefore, after changes this year in the power structures of Poland, the company’s management should naturally change.

At the end of last week, Maciej Mataczynski, deputy chairman of the supervisory board of Orlen, announced his resignation. When leaving, Mataczynski emphasized that he opposed Chalupets’s resignation, which the Ministry of Finance insists on, and, as the Polish press reports, he made it clear that this resignation could interfere with the process of transferring the Lithuanian plant under the control of a Polish company.

Moreover, the process is already slowed down due to the accident that occurred in the summer on the pipeline that delivered oil from Russia to the Lithuanian oil refinery. As Wojciech Wrublewski, senior adviser to the strategy department of PKN Orlen, noted recently in a conversation with VN, “both sides suffer losses. After all, because of this, Russian companies cannot sell oil to Lithuania. If there are no political issues involved in the case, we do not see any difficulties - after the accident is eliminated, we are ready to continue working. And if there really is politics involved here, then that’s very bad. After all, the European Union is now at the stage of establishing an energy dialogue with Russia, and you know how sensitive the EU is to suspicions of energy blackmail. We would like to believe that there are purely technical difficulties."

Dmitry BABICH, Russia Profile, Warsaw - for Vremya Novostei