September 25, 2018, 00:01 / Business

The government may provide tax incentives to Khudainatov's Khabarovsk oil refinery

This will help curb the rise in fuel prices in the Far East, experts say Vitaly Petlevoy Elizaveta Bazanova

The state may provide tax incentives to the Khabarovsk oil refinery of Eduard Khudainatov / Evgeniy Razumny / Vedomosti

Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev may instruct the Ministry of Finance, the Ministry of Energy and other departments to submit to the government a draft federal law on adjusting the tax maneuver in the next month. This is stated in the draft protocol for the meeting on September 18 with the prime minister, the authenticity of which was confirmed by four people familiar with the results of the meeting. Two of them noted that the protocol is not final and can still be adjusted.

The document, which Vedomosti reviewed, mentions that the bill needs to establish logistics surcharges when calculating the reverse excise tax on oil for refineries in the Far East, Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug, Yugra and the Kemerovo region. The amendments, in particular, will affect the Khabarovsk oil refinery of Neftegazholding owned by Eduard Khudainatov and the Komsomolsk oil refinery of Rosneft (their representatives did not respond to Vedomosti’s requests). Initially, the Far Eastern Federal District was not included in the list of regions for which the government is ready to subsidize the cost of oil if it, after processing into Euro-5 gasoline and diesel fuel, is supplied to the Russian market, an interlocutor close to one of the oil refineries in the region told Vedomosti. Far East.

“The government considered that the Khabarovsk and Komsomolsk refineries have close export markets - and therefore the regions were not included in the initial law on completing the tax maneuver,” says Vedomosti’s interlocutor. But now the situation can be corrected, he notes. The establishment of a logistic coefficient for calculating reverse excise tax in relation to production facilities located in some regions is still being discussed, there is no decision, says a representative of the Ministry of Finance. The Ministry of Finance does not support adding a surcharge for refineries in these regions - this will lead to a loss of budget revenues, while the economic feasibility is unfounded, says Vedomosti’s interlocutor participating in the discussion of the measure.

The situation in the fuel market of the Far East is very difficult, said President of the Russian Fuel Union Evgeny Arkusha. There is an acute shortage of fuel at independent gas stations: due to the fact that small volumes are sold through the exchange, a situation has arisen in which exchange prices and, accordingly, small wholesale prices are higher than retail prices in the region, says Arkusha. The Khabarovsk Refinery does not sell fuel on the stock exchange, but supplies it to NNK gas stations; only the Komsomolsk Refinery sells fuel through the site, the expert notes.

The Komsomolsk refinery is capable of processing 6 million tons of oil per year and supplying the market with more than 3 million tons of gasoline and diesel fuel, the Khabarovsk refinery is capable of processing up to 6 million tons, the plant’s output of light oil products in 2014 was 2.6 million tons. How much does it supply? enterprises to the domestic market, but company representatives do not say how much they export.

The refinery in the Far East is located far from the main European export market, said Raiffeisenbank analyst Andrey Polishchuk. “There are only two refineries in the region, which need to supply the domestic market, including, sometimes, to the detriment of their own economic interests,” argues Polishchuk. Combined with the large transport leverage for delivering oil to refineries, this worsens the economics of the plants compared to refineries in the western part of Russia, where the European market is close and there is a large selection of resource bases with a relatively small transport leverage, the expert believes. New measures will allow the company to curb the rise in gasoline prices in the Far East, Polishchuk believes.

But these are not all the government’s proposals - the draft protocol to Medvedev’s meeting also states that the Ministry of Finance and other departments will have to increase compensation to oil workers for the supply of fuel to the domestic market from 2019 - 60% of the difference between export prices and the fixed price of 50,400 rubles. for 1 ton of gasoline and 45,000 rubles. for 1 ton of diesel fuel. Oil workers do not intend to limit themselves to compensation for curbing price increases - they want more serious support from the state in the future.-