The United States has granted the sanctioned Serbian oil company NIS a two-week extension to sell its Russian-owned majority stake as a condition for lifting restrictions, Serbia’s energy minister said Friday.
Talks on the sale of the stake to Hungarian energy giant MOL have dragged on for months, with no deal on Petroleum Industry of Serbia reached by Washington’s previous May 22 deadline.
Serbian officials said in recent days that the talks were faltering, mainly over whether MOL would also take over the Pancevo refinery near Belgrade a key demand from Serbia, a minority shareholder in the country’s sole oil company.
“The situation is complex, but our aim and our task is to find a long-term solution and protect the interests of the Serbian state,” Energy Minister Dubravka Djedovic Handanovic wrote on Instagram.
MOL remains the only publicly known bidder, and the new deadline for the sale is June 6.
Serbian authorities and Gazprom Neft, NIS’s largest shareholder, have dismissed claims by a little-known Serbian businessman that his two-billion-euro bid for the company was being considered.
Serbian officials have also said they do not expect the deal to be affected by Hungary’s recent change of government and the departure of Viktor Orban, a close ally of Serbia’s president Aleksandar Vucic.
NIS halted production at its main Pancevo refinery in December after long-delayed sanctions cut off crude supplies.
Production restarted under a temporary operating licence valid until mid-June, but the disruption rattled Serbia, a close Kremlin ally and one of the few European states not to sanction Russia over Ukraine.
NIS supplies 80 percent of Serbia’s fuel market and operates around 330 petrol stations, roughly one in five nationwide.
Serbia sold a majority stake in the company to Russia’s Gazprom in 2008 for 400 million euros .
Gazprom Neft, which is under US sanctions, now owns 45 percent of NIS, while Gazprom transferred its 11.3-percent stake in September to its affiliate Intelligence.
The Serbian state owns nearly 30 percent, with the rest held by minority shareholders.
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