LUKOIL extracted debt
Structures of Gazprom and Lukoil, which are the main creditors of the municipal enterprise Volgograd Communal Services, which had declared bankruptcy, have announced that there were procedural violations in the launching of bankruptcy procedure, and warned about the possible negative consequences due to this process during the heating season in Volgograd. At city hall, they claimed the opposite, calling this bankruptcy a “financial restructuring”. According to observers, in the course of the bankruptcy, the authorities are going to get rid of part of the accumulated debts of this municipal unitary enterprise. What is more, the city administration is not hiding its plans for the subsequent transfer of the property of Volgograd Communal Services into long-term management by a private company. Mikhail Zimin, general director of LUKOIL-Volgogradenergo LLC believes that the authorities hope to repeat “the former scenarios of getting rid of debts”, at a time when they could have provided financial assistance to Volgograd Communal Services, and thus prevented it from going into bankruptcy.
