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25.09.2012 10:08

MOL Cuts Payments for Nabucco for Q3, Invests in Hungarian Gas Drills (Update)

The Hungarian company lost its equal partner rights and now has a smaller share in the project company

AUTHOR: publics.bg

© Nabucco Gas Pipeline

Hungary’s MOL has not transferred any finances due for the quarter to the consortium for constructing Nabucco gas pipeline, thus losing its rights of an equal partner in the consortium. MOL’s share is down from 16.7% to 14.7% after the company did not pay its contribution. At the same time the other Nabucco partners – OMV (Austria), RWE (Germany), Transgaz (Romania), Bulgarian Energy Holding (Bulgaria) and Botas (Turkey), have a share of 17.6% each, Budapest Times reports, as autoed by Focus News.

In April MOL announced its willingness to sell its share in the Nabucco consortium due to concerns about the project cost, sources of raw material, structure and management, but so far nobody has expressed interest in the offer.

Hungarian oil and gas group MOL will invest over 300 billion forints ($1.38 bln) in its operations in Hungary in the next three years, half of which will go into local exploration and field development, the company announced, as reported by Reuters.

MOL, one of central Europe's biggest energy firms, said it would also build a new plant in eastern Hungary at a cost of 30 billion forints to produce butadiene, an important industrial chemical used in the production of synthetic rubber.

"We have no other possibility but to grow out of the crisis; to regain a leading position among European refiners via the implementation of accelerated investments and a reduction of our costs at the same," MOL Chief Executive Jozsef Molnar said in a statement posted on the Budapest bourse's website.

In a separate statement, MOL said it had signed the contracts related to a $500 million 7-year bond issue which the company announced earlier this month.

In August MOL said it targeted up to $2 billion in capex annually in the 2012-2014 period. Part of these funds would be invested in upstream projects in Kurdistan, Russia and Kazakhstan, in Hungarian conventional and unconventional exploration projects and also in Croatian exploration.