Brandenburg’s government is positive about the renewed trusteeship of the PCK refinery. Will the Russian state-owned company Rosneft sell its shares to Qatar?
Brandenburg’s Economics Minister Jörg Steinbach (SPD) sees the extension of the trust administration at the PCK oil refinery in Schwedt as a signal that the Russian state-owned company Rosneft is seriously interested in selling its majority shares. “I am very pleased that the Russian side is clearly interested in independently selling its plants and refineries in Germany and has entered into serious negotiations with a potential buyer. That is the Qataris,” Steinbach told the German Press Agency in Potsdam.
According to dpa information, the German government wants to extend the trust administration of the shares of the Russian state-owned company Rosneft in the PCK refinery in Schwedt. The trust administration would otherwise have expired on September 10. The basis is the Energy Security Act.
Steinbach: Another step away from expropriation of the refinery
The extension of the trust solution offers the possibility “of being a little further away from the much more complex and risky path of expropriation,” said Economics Minister Steinbach. Regarding Rosneft’s plans to sell its refinery shares, he said that such a process generally takes several months. “It would be a particularly quick procedure if we received some kind of signal in this regard by the end of the year.” Rosneft holds 54 percent of the shares in the PCK refinery in northeast Brandenburg.
The shares have been under federal trust administration since September 2022. The background to this is the federal government’s decision to stop importing Russian oil because of Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine. At the beginning of 2023, PCK switched to other sources of supply. Rosneft announced in the spring that it wanted to sell the shares. The federal government is in talks with the oil state of Qatar about the sale of the Rosneft shares.
Source: Stern
