Ukrtransnafta and Ukrtatnafta have reached an amicable agreement on a three-year dispute over the cost of storage and the conditions for the return of process oil which has been stored at Ukrtatnafta's Kremenchuk refinery since the spring of 2014.
The amicable agreement was published by Kyiv's Economic Court, according to the Yevropeyska Pravda news website.
Under the document, oil will be returned to the state company by 31 March. The cost of oil storage for the entire period from April 2014 to December 2017 is reduced from 9.6 hryvnyas per t per day, as the Kremenchuk oil refinery wanted, to 2.57 hryvnyas per t per day (excluding VAT).
Consequently, the amount of compensation required by the plant for its storage has been reduced from 2.1bn hryvnyas to 712.6m hryvnyas.
Under the amicable agreement, the refinery accepts Ukrtransnafta's counter claims worth 193.6m hryvnyas. This includes about 54.9m hryvnyas of the debt on promissory notes issued in February 2002 and 138.7m hryvnyas of the debt and penalties for Kazakh oil accumulated in 2013.
Thus, Ukrtransnafta's liabilities for oil storage have been reduced to 519m hryvnyas. The state company should transfer this sum to the Kremenchuk refinery by 31 March 2018 subject to the return of oil.
The refund procedure provides for a revolving payment for each shipment made. Oil is expected to be returned in batches of 10,000 t.
In total, the refinery must return 140,200 t of oil which it still stores. The rest of the volume was sold by the state-owned company on the stock exchange in the second half of 2017. Ukrtatnafta was the main buyer although part of the volume was also purchased by the state-owned company Ukrhazvydobuvannya.
The conflict between Ukrtatnafta (Kremenchuk refinery) and Ukrtransnafta started in mid-March 2015, after tycoon Ihor Kolomoyskyy lost control of the state-owned company.