BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS

DATE:

25/12/2006

Belarus gets threat from Gazprom

The Associated Press

MOSCOW: Gazprom, the Russian state-owned natural gas monopoly, on Monday threatened Belarus over its refusal to agree to tough conditions on a price increase for natural gas, saying that its supplies could be at risk next week.

Raising the specter of a repeat of the dispute with Ukraine on Jan. 1, 2005, when supplies were briefly cut off, a Gazprom spokesman said that Belarus was insisting on maintaining subsidized prices next year comparable to the prices paid in Russia.

"The position which they have adopted today is absolutely irresponsible and threatens Belarus's energy supplies," the spokesman, Sergei Kupriyanov, said in televised remarks.

"The current contract for gas deliveries to Belarus expires in six days," he was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency.

Gazprom has demanded that Belarus pay the equivalent of $200 per 1,000 cubic meters, a fourfold increase over the current price. Kupriyanov said later on Monday that Gazprom would agree to a lower price, equivalent to $80 per 1,000 cubic meters, if Belarus handed over 50 percent of its state-controlled natural gas transport network, according to a report by RIA Novosti, a state news agency.

Kupriyanov said Belarus was alone among other former Soviet republics in seeking to keep subsidized rates, a position that contradicts Gazprom's policy of switching all its energy sales to a market basis.

Regional energy pact is near

Georgia and Azerbaijan, two former Soviet republics, are near an agreement that would undermine Russia's energy dominance in the region, Bloomberg News reported from Moscow.

The Georgian energy minister, Nika Gilauri, plans further talks in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, on Tuesday to determine the price of natural gas deliveries from Azerbaijan in the Shah Deniz field, his spokeswoman, Teona Doliashvili, said Monday. Georgia wants to diversify its energy imports away from Russia, which more than doubled the price of its natural gas for next year.

Source:

http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/25/business/oil.php

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