Russia has no plans to resume oil export via Latvia

Russia has no plans to resume oil export via the Latvian pipeline, which belongs to Ventspils Nafta, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Viktor Khristenko told RBC. He added that the Ventspils route was not included in the Russian oil export plan for the third quarter of 2003.

As it was reported earlier, Russia had excluded the traditional route via Ventspils from the export plan since the beginning of 2003. This decision was motivated by an increase in the capacity of Russian oil pipelines. Information was released later that Transneft, which is Russia's oil transport monopoly, had been thus pressing Ventspils Nafta, since it was interested in buying the controlling block of shares in the oil terminal. Transneft Vice-President Sergey Grigoryev told RBC that the company had not received any new proposals on participating in the privatization of the Latvian terminal.

Ventspils Nafta is the main oil terminal of the Ventspils port with a capacity of 16m tons of oil and 12m tons of oil products a year. The terminal's largest shareholder is the Latvian government, which owns 42.68 percent of the shares.