The Austrians from OMV, the big beneficiaries of the privatization of Petrom, are more and more greedy

By Constantin Radut
Sold, in 2004, under the pressure of the European powers to receive us in NATO and the European Union, the national company Petrom SA, ended up in the hands of the Austrians from OMV on a ridiculous amount of about 600 million euros. In this way, the then government of Romania, pressured, as I said, by the Western powers, led by Germany, ceded a large part of the economic patrimony of the country to a second-hand company in Europe, namely OMV.
Petrom’s assets at the date of sale were: 220,000 barrels of oil per day, almost double compared to OMV; oil and gas reserves estimated at 1 billion barrels of oil equivalent; 306 oil and gas fields, associated with 1,450 gas wells and 13,856 oil wells; over 15,000 km of oil, gas and water transmission pipelines; refining capacity of 8 million tons of oil annually, in the two refineries, Arpechim and Petrobrazi; 600 gas stations, of which 200 were brought to Western standards; Doljchim fertilizer plant, with an annual capacity of 1.4 million tons; 145 active deposits; 1,540 road tankers; 1,470 railway wagons
From all this patrimony, after the sale, the Austrians from OMV developed a serious plan for the disintegration of Petrom’s extractive, refining and processing infrastructure. They started with the seizure of the sales stations, which they changed, overnight the logo from Petrom to OMV. They closed and left the Arpechim refinery scrap. They have reduced oil and refining production. The Austrians from OMV were so hostile that they did not want to sell the Dolj chemical fertilizer plant to a Romanian company. This is what Ioan Niculae, the strongest Romanian in the chemical fertilizer industry, says with documents. Ioan Niculae shows that the Austrians sold the DoljChim plant for scrap metal.
When you enter the hands of the Germans, you can only be a secondary character in the economic landscape. And not only. Proof that now, 16 years after they got rich from Petrom and became a regional company, the Austrians from OMV are urged to steal something else from Romania’s assets.
Today, OMV announced that the Paris Arbitration Tribunal ruled on July 9 that the Romanian Ministry of Environment must pay 287 million lei, plus interest, to the Austrian company OMV.
The amount represents the value of the environmental works (well closures and decontamination of some polluted sites from Arpechim, Doljchim and Petrobrazi) carried out by OMV after the acquisition of the majority stake in the former state company Petrom.
The Ministry of Environment did not recognize these costs, so OMV started the arbitration procedure in 2017. Two weeks ago, the Ministry of Environment lost, the decision of the Paris Arbitral Tribunal being final.
“On July 9, 2020, the Arbitral Tribunal issued the Final Decision in the arbitration initiated by OMV Aktiengesellschaft (” OMV AG “) at the Paris International Chamber of Commerce (” ICC “) against the Romanian Ministry of Environment, regarding certain notifications of claims not paid by the Ministry of Environment for the costs incurred by OMV Petrom SA on well decommissioning and environmental restoration works. The arbitral tribunal requested the Ministry of Environment to reimburse OMV Petrom S.A. the amount of 287.62 million lei (almost the entire amount initially requested) and the related interest. The impact of the decision is reflected in the results for Q2 / 20 and refers mainly to the recognition of an interest income in the net financial result “, it is shown in the financial report of OMV Petrom.
The Austrians, like their older brothers in Germany, are the great beneficiaries of the fall of the Iron Curtain. They have destroyed the economies of the former socialist states and do not stop until they see them transformed into real labor colonies.