We need to break Gazprom into parts – said Ilya Ponomarev, left wing Russian opposition State Duma deputy and expert on energy sector. In his opinion the company works like a ministry for now.
– That is the reason why is it used as a political weapon. Gas sector is in bigger state control than oil, so oil was never used like Gazprom. It is because of reform which never came to gas sector. Gazprom needs that. In terms of survival we got perfect gas fields. Additional competition would not hurt, especially with higher prices than Gazprom is able to give. It will force the company to stop being a political tool and work as normal market company. It is an inevitable future – said Ponomarev to BiznesAlert.pl. He sees a perspective for a change though. It will start on political ground. – It will come fast. Current regime in Russia is unsustainable. It will not fall in a year. The economy is not that bad, we still got the resources to prevail hard conditions. About year 2017 or 2018 we will see significant changes.
– Gazprom is not a player – Ponomarev underlined. – It is Vladimir Putin and his administration who play. Igor Sechin from Rosneft is put in place to manage oil sector and Alexey Miller from Gazprom is managing gas sector. There is a competition between them. Putin always creates such situations to balance the power. But Gazprom is his direct toy.
– It is a geopolitical weapon to keep weaker countries dependent on Russian gas. It is ruining the competitiveness of the company which gives enormously high prices where it should fight for customers, like in Central and Eastern Europe. So those countries are diversifying the sources of natural gas because they perceive Gazprom as unreliable source. And we need to remember that reliability of gas supplies was one of the biggest leverage of Russians in Soviet times. Right now nobody trust Gazprom – said Russian expert on sidelines of Central and Eastern Europe Shale Gas and Oil Summit in Warsaw.
So fundamentally is Kremlin working against Gazprom interests? Our speaker thinks so. – Well, it works against the interests of Russians in general. But particularly against Gazprom’s interests. We need to keep politics out of the company. We need a new team with new approach – Ponomarev concluded.
Commentary was originally published in Polish in BiznesAlert.pl portal
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