Translated material
Construction accounting
Transneft's dividends were one third lower than last year's
The Board of Directors of Transneft has shown traditional stinginess in relation to the owners of the company's preferred shares (as is known, they belong to private structures and constitute 25% of the authorized capital). He recommended that the shareholders' meeting approve dividends on preferred shares in the amount of only 350 million rubles. (RUB 225.42 per share), which is 24% lower than a year ago. Payments on ordinary shares to the Russian budget, however, decreased even more - by approximately 45%, to 472.2 million rubles. (RUB 101.23 per share). In general, the volume of payments decreased by 36.7%, to 8.22.7 million rubles. Transneft explains this situation by a decrease in net profit according to Russian accounting standards, from which dividends are calculated. “If last year it reached 4.6 billion rubles, then this year it is only 3.5 billion rubles. “Everything is now spent on the construction of the Eastern Siberia - Pacific Ocean oil pipeline,” complains the vice-president of the company, Sergei Grigoriev.Transneft has long exceeded all possible monetary limits for the construction of the East Siberian oil pipeline. If three years ago, when presenting the project, Mipromenergo expected that the total cost of construction of two stages of the oil pipeline would be about $11.5 billion, while it was planned to allocate about $6.6 billion for the first branch, then in February Transneft in a memorandum before issuing Eurobonds, it was forced to admit that the first stage alone would cost no less than $13.2 billion. And despite this, the monopoly continues to say that it will be able to raise all the funds on its own without any problems.
In addition, this year Transneft should begin another, albeit less ambitious, but still costly project - the construction of an oil pipeline bypassing Belarus with a length of about a thousand kilometers. So everything that will not go to shareholders will be used to implement this project. According to the calculations of the board of directors, this amount will amount to 2.682 billion rubles, which will be spent, says Transneft, “to finance work on carrying out a one-stage design with the development of a declaration of intent and working documentation for the Baltic Pipeline System project.” In the future, this amount will only grow, which means there is no hope of increasing payments to shareholders.
Minority shareholders have been accusing Transneft of declining net profit figures for several years. They cite as an example net profit indicators according to international financial reporting standards, which are always several times different from those calculated according to Russian standards. In particular, profit under IFRS for last year showed a slight increase, reaching 54.861 billion rubles, despite the implementation of large-scale projects. But Transneft has a simple and long-traditional answer to this: “We pay dividends on preferred shares, as required by law, that is, 10% of profit according to RAS,” said Mr. Grigoriev.
Builders of the Eastern Oil Pipeline are restoring roads destroyed during the transportation of pipes and heavy equipment . The bulk of work has already been completed on the head section of the highway from Taishet to Ust-Kut, and now all attention is paid to the section along the Lena River, ITAR-TASS was told at the Eastern Siberia - Pacific Ocean Project Management Center. In the Kirensky district of the Irkutsk region, about 250 km of pipes were transported by heavy vehicles in winter and early spring. As a result of the destruction of roads, seven settlements were cut off from the “mainland”. To carry out restoration work, the general contractor for the construction of the highway, Stroytransgaz, used about 20 pieces of equipment, including excavators, bulldozers, and graders. The construction of the Eastern Oil Pipeline is carried out in poorly developed areas where roads are completely absent or are not designed for heavy vehicles. This is especially true for the section bypassing Lake Baikal from the city of Ust-Kut to the Talakan oil and gas field and further through the territory of Yakutia.