While the prime minister has not changed

Alexey Miller and Yuriy Boyko agreed on the chain of payments for gas

Today Gazprom, RosUkrEnergo, Ukrgazenergo and Naftogaz of Ukraine will sign a package of documents approving a scheme for repaying the billion-dollar debt for gas supplied to the Ukrainian market. Fundamental issues were agreed yesterday during hours-long negotiations by the chairman of the board of the Russian concern, Alexey Miller, and the Minister of Fuel and Energy of Ukraine, Yuriy Boyko. It was extremely important for Gazprom to sign binding papers under the current government, which, apparently, will cease to exist this week - simply in order to deprive the new cabinet of ministers (which could be headed by Yulia Tymoshenko, who has her own approaches to gas cooperation between Russia and Ukraine) the temptation not to recognize debts. It is characteristic that the debt settlement documents will be signed on the day when the still-current Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych arrives in Moscow for negotiations with Viktor Zubkov. And one of the main topics of the negotiations was already decided at the city level. Miller and Boyko, the problem of gas debt.

Gazprom buys gas from Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan and resells it to the Swiss-registered trader RosUkrEnergo (50% owned by Gazprom, 45% by Dmitry Firtash, 5% by Ivan Fursin) at $101 per thousand cubic meters. On the Russian-Ukrainian border, the intermediary transfers gas to the company Ukrgazenergo (a parity joint venture between RosUkrEnergo and Naftogaz, which sells it to industrial consumers, as well as to Naftogaz itself) at $130 per thousand cubic meters.

At the end of September, the Russian monopolist announced that the Ukrainian side (that is, RosUkrEnergo) owed it more than $1.3 billion, and threatened to reduce supplies for the needs of Ukraine. Thus, it is easy to calculate that the trader did not pay for about 13 billion cubic meters (or about a quarter of the annual volume). No official explanation was given as to how exactly the debt was formed. Meanwhile, based on information coming from Kyiv, it became clear that Ukrgazenergo did not transfer part of the money (about $500 million for 3.5 billion cubic meters) to Naftogaz. The remaining amount of the debt could have formed in connection with the summer injection of gas into underground storage facilities in Ukraine, as a result of which RosUkrEnergo now stores about 10 billion cubic meters, Naftogaz - about 6 billion cubic meters and Ukrgazenergo - more than 12 billion cubic meters

Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, his secretariat said, gave Mr. Yanukovych directives for the now-concluded negotiations. As Deputy Head of the Presidential Secretariat Alexander Chaly told reporters yesterday, the head of state clearly takes the position that “Ukraine has no debt to Gazprom,” and also that the largest Ukrainian concern, Naftogaz of Ukraine, has no debt. If there is a debt, then it is the debt of intermediary structures that are not subjects of Ukrainian law. At the same time, the government must exert influence on these companies, in particular RosUkrEnergo and Ukrgazenergo, since they are under its responsibility.

Over the weekend, Mr. Boyko said that part of the debt would be repaid by returning gas stored in underground storage facilities to Gazprom, and the rest in cash. According to him, “about 600 million dollars of debt will be closed in kind” (that is, Ukrgazenergo will return about 4.5 billion cubic meters to Gazprom through RosUkrEnergo). The rest of the debt will be repaid in cash in the near future. Before signing the documents, Gazprom refused to officially comment on the details. But they did not deny the model proposed by Mr. Boyko.

Alexey GRIVACHS