Transneft at the end of last week stopped supplying oil to all three of the New Stream refineries, Dmitry Mazurov, due to the lack of routing instructions. According to Kommersant sources, New Stream did not buy oil on time for its factories, allowing extremely untypical for the industry supply interruptions. Several sources of Kommersant talk about the possible financial difficulties of the group, noting that this year it already had supply disruptions. Experts associate the situation with the tax maneuver and expect its deterioration for independent refiners. However, in the fuel market, the problems of New Stream are not yet reflected.
The group of New Stream Dmitry Mazurov last week faced stopping the supply of oil at once to all three of its oil refineries. According to Transneft, due to the lack of route orders, deliveries to the largest refinery of the Antipinsky group, as well as to the Afipsky plant, were stopped on September 21, and to the Mari oil refinery on September 17. Transneft was informed on Friday that the supply of raw materials to Afipsky Refinery was planned to resume later the same day. New Stream did not comment on the stoppage of supplies.
The group includes three refineries - Antipinsky, which on September 20 launched production of gasoline grade 5, as well as Mari and Afipsky, which do not produce gasoline yet, but which New Stream planned to modernize. Unlike large oil companies, New Stream does not have its own production assets, so the group buys oil on the domestic market.
The absence of routing orders means that New Stream did not buy oil for delivery to its refineries, a source in the industry explained to Kommersant. "This is a strange behavior, because downtime in the operation of the refinery leads to additional costs, especially if they last more than a few days, then the plant will have to completely restart after the stop," he says. One source of Kommersant in the industry assumes that New Stream does not have enough working capital to buy oil, and another - that the company is trying to achieve more favorable conditions for its purchase. At the same time, this year supplies to the Antipinsky refinery have been repeatedly interrupted: in February, Transneft vice-president Sergei Andronov linked this with the "financial problems" of New Stream, while the group explained the breaks with repairs of oil pipelines. One of the sources of Kommersant, close to one of the companies, says that oil supplies have been interrupted since the end of last year.
At the moment, stopping oil supplies to New Stream plants does not affect fuel supply, Anton Rubtsov, the head of the reprocessing department of the Ministry of Energy, told Kommersant. "Currently, the company's refineries are working close to the announced plan for September, which will produce about 50 thousand tons of gasoline and about 180 thousand tons of diesel fuel." He noted that "temporary delays in deliveries to New Stream refineries are not related to technological, but to commercial features of the company's work" and "in any case this will not affect the provision of the domestic market with fuel."
The termination of supplies to the Antipinsky refinery looks all the more strange, that on September 20 the plant started producing gasoline of the 5th class after a costly upgrade. Beginning of gasoline production will allow the plant to receive a negative excise tax for oil from the next year within the framework of tax maneuver, however, two other refineries do not produce gasoline, and therefore even if they receive a reverse excise, then on a temporary basis and in a smaller amount. In particular, the economy of the Mari oil refinery is likely to become negative, Kommersant sources say in the market, and the overall position of the group is even more difficult given the high debt. The net debt of New Stream was $ 2.5 billion at the end of 2016, since then the data has not been disclosed. The main creditor of the group is Sberbank, where yesterday they refused to comment. As Kommersant wrote on September 10, the bank's representatives entered the management bodies of New Stream structures instead of Igor Makarov, the former owner of the Itera gas company. Mr. Makarov himself emerges from New Stream, and a new shareholder will take his place, and probably, these will be structures close to Sberbank. Also, the bank has already become the owner of the "gold", or priority, shares of the Antipinsky refinery.
The current situation reflects the scale of problems faced by independent oil refining due to tax maneuver, believes Mikhail Turukalov from the "Analyst of commodity markets." He notes that the majority of independent refineries, which were built relatively recently with borrowed funds, now face financial difficulties and "this problem will be aggravated in the coming years as the tax maneuver is completed and export duties on oil and oil products are canceled."