The situation has signs of a gas-related issue: who took money from the Rosneft subsidiary's 'daughter'

The LLC “Kharampurneftegaz” project, which seemed promising, didn't succeed with the staff. The top manager managed to make millions, but where was the management looking?

The Investigative Committee's Department for Particularly Important Cases in YaNAO completed the investigation of a criminal case against the Deputy General Director for Capital Construction of Kharampurneftegaz LLC. The company is controlled by Rosneft and BP structures.

The Moscow Post correspondent in Yamalo-Nenets Autonomous Okrug looked into the situation.

Get to the point

The deputy general director of a Rosneft subsidiary in Yamal was under investigation in 2020 and has since been involved in new corruption episodes. All accusations against the top manager relate to cases of commercial bribery.

According to investigators, the first crime occurred in June 2019, involving 2.75 million rubles. Later, two more episodes were revealed – in December 2018 and July 2019, the top manager received 2.25 million rubles from businessmen in two tranches, as reported by PASMI (recognized as a foreign agent in Russia).

It has now become known that the deputy general director for capital construction will be accused of receiving a bribe in the amount of 1.5 million rubles. This time, PromStroyKontrol LLC is involved in the case, as reported by Pravda UrFO.

The accused allegedly requested the firm's head to give him the bribe, promising to provide general patronage and not apply penalties under the contract for the field development executed by PromStroyKontrol. The money was transferred to the top manager in parts.

As a result, PromStroyKontrol did not become part of a criminal case for facilitating the investigation, unlike the ex-deputy director of Kharampurneftegaz.

By the way, PromStroyKontrol is currently undergoing bankruptcy proceedings. It suffered a loss of 44 million rubles in 2021, even though its revenue was only 7 million rubles, compared to 802 million rubles in 2020.

Apart from the financial confusion, there is an interesting point in the company's affairs: it was a supplier in two government contracts worth 21 million rubles. Both contracts were from PJSC NK Rosneft, one in 2019 and the other in 2021.

Photo: rusprofile.ru

So, even if the parent company knew about and encouraged PromStroyKontrol, it's strange that all these corruption stories involving a top manager passed by higher officials in at least one case.

Gas-related 'daughter'

Kharampurneftegaz LLC was registered in 2012 but only started operating in 2018. It was established to develop the Kharampur field. It was expected that most of the employees of another Rosneft subsidiary, Kynsko-Chaselskoye Neftegaz LLC, would become part of the company.

Bipi Russian Investments Limited (BP) holds 49% of the authorized capital, and another 51% is owned by Rosneft's subsidiary RN-Gas, which manages the oil company's gas assets.

However, due to the political situation, the British BP, the second largest shareholder of Rosneft, announced the termination of cooperation. BP intends to sell its 19.75% stake in Rosneft with a current value of $11.5 billion, which it has owned since 2013, and also withdraw from all joint projects. This was written by “Kommersant”.

Obviously, this will also affect Kharampurneftegaz. By the way, judging by the data for 2020, the company’s business was not going uphill. She suffered a loss of 3 billion rubles.

Photo: rusprofile.ru

Oleg Ivanov, director of the planning, performance management and gas business development department at Rosneft, told TASS last year that the total production from this gas project could potentially reach 25 billion cubic meters. m of gas per year. According to him, the project may become the company’s largest gas brainchild – larger even than Rospan.

If this is true, then how is it that the top managers of Kharampurneftegaz include people who can get rich on commercial bribery of 6.5 million rubles?

Firstly, why don’t questions arise to the director of the company, Sergei Slichny? After all, he has been running the company since 2018. Doesn’t even Sechin himself follow the affairs of such promising “daughters”?

Igor Sechin did not notice the scandals around subsidiaries? A photo: ptoday.en

Back in 2020, RBC wrote that Rosneft had long announced the importance of the gas business and plans to produce 100 billion cubic meters. m of gas per year by 2020 (for comparison: Gazprom produces 500 billion cubic meters of gas per year), but then moved the ambitious production targets to 2022. In 2019, the company produced 67 billion cubic meters. m of gas.

This is despite the fact that Gazprom is still the only exporter and the largest supplier of gas to the domestic market.

The fact that Rosneft has long been promoting the idea of ​​dividing Gazprom into transport and mining companies is no secret to anyone. This is due to the fact that the existing monopoly on the market prevents them from entering the world gas market.

The project will allow you to get confessions and huge amounts of money, into whose pocket they will fly incomprehensibly. Could a top manager have been able to pull off multi-million dollar cases on his own? Hardly.

There is no direct evidence, but it can be assumed that the top manager in the chain for cutting money simply remained the last one. Where the “good” went is unknown. But if such scams are being carried out at the Kharampurneftegaz company, it’s scary to think what will happen next …