Odesa Port-Side Plant in October would announce a new tender to select a supplier of natural gas for processing on tolling terms, acting Head of the State Property Fund (SPF) of Ukraine Vitaliy Trubarov has said.
“As are as I understand, the tender will be announced again next month and maybe there are economic entities, possibly foreign ones, that could supply their own gas, and the enterprise could operate,” he told journalists in Odesa on the sidelines of the Ukrainian Financial Forum organized by the ICU investment group.
The head of the SPF said that the final decision on the tender is taken by the company management, since representatives of the SPF are members of the supervisory board and do not have the right to interfere in the economic activities of the enterprise.
Trubarov said that in the current market conditions, the attraction of the supplier of gas on tolling terms is the only opportunity of operating for Odesa Port-Side Plant, since “gas that occupies more than 90% of the production cost is quite expensive, and the prices for end products are subsiding.”
According to him, the conditions of the tender to select the company are absolutely open, and the difficulty to select it is the absence of a large number of interested companies.
He said that the SPF is extremely interested that the plant is operating at the time of the privatization work.
“Our task in this matter is to build the work in a way that at the time of sale this asset was operating, alone or with the help of a supplier of natural gas for processing on tolling terms, but operating. Selling an idle enterprise, in my opinion, is a double problem,” the SPF head said, recalling the even more complex problem of toxic debts of the Odesa Port-Side Plant to the structure of Dmytro Firtash.
