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Belarus to announce amount of damage from tainted oil supplies after auditing oil refineries

Saturday, 11 May 2019

Belarus will announce the amount of damage caused by the contamination of the Druzhba oil pipeline after the audits of the oil refineries, Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko said as he talked to the media, BelTA has learned.

The head of state voiced his strong disapproval of the situation. "Due to slackness and lack of discipline in Russia (with the territory stretching thousands of kilometers) the big pipeline system has been polluted with poisonous oil which, as specialists say, eats away at the pipe some 4-5mm per week,” he said.

With regard to the specific amount of damage, it is yet unknown. It is clear that it is huge. “I cannot talk about the exact amount yet. It will finally be known once we take stock of what happened at the Polotsk oil refinery. We are calculating the damages now,” Aleksandr Lukashenko said.

First it is necessary to assess the extent of damage to the equipment of the oil refineries. “We are assessing the damage now. Evey year we stop the oil refineries, one by one, for a month or a month and a half to clean them. Once the audits are done, we will know the extent of the damage,” the president said.

On 19 April, Belneftekhim reported a massive decrease in the quality of the Russian oil mixture Urals flowing in transit into the main oil pipeline section operated by OAO Gomeltransneft Druzhba. The content of organochlorine compounds in oil pipeline exceeded the acceptable limits dozens of times. The Belarusian oil refineries - Mozyr oil refinery and OAO Naftan – had to cut production and suffered losses. The oil meeting all quality standards reached the Belarusian border on 2 May and the line operations control station Mozyr on 4 May.

The official representative of the Russian Investigative Committee Svetlana Petrenko said that, according to the investigation, from August 2018 till April 2019 six suspects, including Director General of OOO Nefteperevalka Svetlana Balaban, Deputy Director General of OOO Nefteperevalka Rustam Khusnutdinov, Director General of OOO Petroneft Aktiv Vladimir Zhogolev, Deputy Director of OOO Magistral Sergei Balandin, were part of the criminal network that stole oil worth at least RUB1 million. In March-April 2019, with the aim to hide the theft, several suspects injected the poor-quality oil into the pipeline system near the village of Nikolaevka in Volzhsky District.