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The Regions This Week
August 10, 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 7
Eastern Europe
The number of Russians who approve of the foreign policy of President Vladimir Putin declined from 22% in 2017 to 16% currently, according to the Levada Center pollster. The Kremlin is facing a rare dive in the popularity of ruling United Russia party ahead of the upcoming regional elections.
Russian natural gas giant Gazprom suspended its external borrowing plans thanks to the threat of legal action as part of its legal dispute with Ukraine's Naftogaz, Reuters said citing unnamed banking sources. Gazprom had to call off a road- show for a potential GBP Eurobond issue in the middle of June needed to refinance $15.2bn in external debt by the end of 2018.
Ex-prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko still leading the presidential polls in Ukraine with 17.7%, while President Petro Poroshenko is trailing in fifth place with 8.3%, according to a recent poll. However, Poroshenko has overtaken Tymoshenko in the “anti-poll”: half the voters said they would not vote for Poroshenko under any circumstances.
Belarus expects to harvest about 7mn tonnes of grain in 2018, the head of the crop production department of the agriculture and food ministry Vasily Yadlovsky said.
The distributor and assembler of VW vehicles
in Russia, Volkswagen Group Rus, became the official supplier of cars and LCVs to Kazakhstan, expanding to one of the largest markets in the region. Kazakhstan is the second-largest car market after Russia in the CIS space.
Russian mobile operator Mobile TeleSystems (MTS) is preparing to enter the IT outsourcing market, planning to provide system integration, service support and internal IT service management for corporate clients.
Russia's largest oil company Rosneft could set- tle its most recent legal offensive against its foreign partners in the Sakhalin-1 project with a $0.2bn-0.3bn out-of-court payment, Kommer- sant and Vedomosti dailies reported citing infor- mation from Indian ONGC. Rosneft claims that its partners in Sakhalin have transferred oil from the North Chayvo field (owned by Rosneft) to the Chayvo field (Sakhalin-1 project) since 2005.
Ukraine loses over €4bn a year due to corrup- tion in its customs service, an investigation by a German newspaper found. "It is more than one tenth of all revenue of the budget and double the sum that Ukraine expects to receive in 2018 from the International Monetary Fund, the European Union and the World Bank,” according to an inves- tigation by the Süddeutsche Zeitung
Software major Luxoft said it will acquire Germany-based provider of advanced technology solutions for the automotive sector Objective Software. Luxoft did not provide any more details on the deal that would be worth an estimated $10mn-$15mn.
Russia's second-largest gas company Novatek asked ship-owner Teekay to deliver a second Arc7 LNG tanker earlier than previously planned, as the launch of Novatek's second LNG line is to be brought forward to August 2018.
Steel output at Ukraine’s largest producer Met- invest was 19.1 kt per day (or 591 kt per month) in July, an 11.2% m/m decrease in average daily terms, according to Concorde Capital.
Russia's largest oil companies are still negotiating the parameters of the government’s proposed "tax manoeuvre" fiscal reform in the oil and gas sector and will take up the issue with President Vladimir Putin after August 27.