OMV Austria, the company founded after the Second World War by the Stalinist regime in Moscow, continues the policy of Soviet imperialism

By Constantin Radut
In great difficulty after the start of Moscow’s war against Ukraine, OMV Austria seeks to obtain advantages from its strong subsidiaries, especially from Petrom Romania.
For those who are not familiar with the field, it should be pointed out that OMV was, until the acquisition, in 2004, of Petrom Romania, an insignificant company on the European level. Petrom’s assets made OMV an important player on the market in Central and Eastern Europe by the simple fact that it started to own on-shore and off-shore oil perimeters, as well as natural gas fields that it bought in approximately 600 thousand euros from the Romanian state.
As I said, OMV was born by the will of the post-Stalinist regime in Moscow, on July 3, 1956, when the company then known as the Soviet Mineral Oil Administration (Sowjetische Mineralölverwaltung, SMV) was officially registered in the Trade Register. SMV was a corporation formed after the war, during the Soviet occupation.
Its dependence, like that of the Austrian state, on the Soviet regime is demonstrated by the fact that in 1968, the first natural gas supply contract was signed with the former USSR. At the end of 1987, 15% of OMV was privatized, becoming the first Austrian state-owned company to be listed on the stock exchange. Worth noting is the fact that only on June 26, 1990, OMV opened its first gas station, in Vienna.
Until then, nobody knew about OMV. Only the directors and the vassal state of Moscow, from Vienna.
Only after 2004, OMV became a regional company. In 2004, OMV became the market leader in Central and Eastern Europe by acquiring 51% of the Romanian oil and natural gas group Petrom, which represented, at the time, the largest acquisition in OMV’s history.
Having become the main shareholder of Petrom Romania, OMV benefited from the know-how of Romanian specialists and the entire oil extraction and distribution infrastructure.
The presence of OMV in Romania brought our country only disastrous effects. He abolished the largest petrochemical plants in Romania (which he sold for scrap), outsourced more than 30% of the oil wells and every year reduced the production of natural gas extracted from the Romanian deposits. This is because OMV was all these years a kind of branch of Gazprom from where it supplied the Austrian and German markets.
Moscow’s war in Ukraine has put OMV’s strategy in difficulty. As a result, in the fall of 2022, OMV notified the authorities in Vienna that it does not have the possibility to ensure domestic consumption with natural gas.
Desperate for the cause, the mini-imperialist government in Vienna sends its vassal, namely Alfred Stern, CEO, to Bucharest to negotiate with the Romanian government the reduction of royalties for the production obtained by OMV in Romania and to request the modification of the Off-shore Law. The purpose of this change is for the Romanian state not to have the right of preemption over the Neptun Deep gas field in the Black Sea.
Since the representatives of the Romanian state did not agree with the claims of OMV, Alfred Stern reported to the governors in Vienna the beginning of the movements to sanction Romania’s external interests.
A typical communist, Stalinist strategy.