Rosneft Oil Company Made USD 730 Million Profit in 2002 - 12 March, 2003

Provisional figures show that Rosneft's balance sheet profit in 2002 came to USD 727.8 billion. As a Rosbalt correspondent reports, this was announced at a press conference yesterday by Rosneft President Sergei Bogdanchikov. He said that this figure roughly marks a 3% increase year on year. Mr Bogdanchikov added that an official financial report on the results of 2002 would appear in the next few days. He mentioned that the results for 2002 had demonstrated the effectiveness of the new tax on mineral extraction for the government. He said that payments by the company's core enterprise Purneftegaz had shot up by 2.06 times.

Rosneft, which is 100% state-owned, is currently working on two joint large-scale projects with Gazprom to develop the Prirazlomnoye and Shtokmanovskoye fields in the Barents Sea and also has a project with Surgutneftegaz to construct an oil refining plant in Primorsk in the Leningrad Region. Rosneft owns a large chain of filling stations in the Murmansk and Arkhangelsk Regions as well as a sea terminal for exports in Arkhangelsk.