What is behind Gazprom’s loud statement about the payment of 5 trillion rubles?

The Russian gas monopoly Gazprom decided to make a good impression before the New Year and announced to the public that it would transfer more than 5 trillion rubles to the Russian budget in 2022. One can understand the desire of the gas monopolist to please the Russians, because the gasification of the regions is not going very well so far. But on closer examination of such a loud statement, it turns out that not everything is so smooth.

The fact is that the above estimate takes into account more than 1.2 trillion rubles, which is an additional amount of tax on the extraction of minerals (MET). In early July, the State Duma adopted a law on a one-time increase in the company’s severance tax for exactly this amount.

It just so happened that it is approximately equal to the amount of dividends that Gazprom decided not to pay to shareholders (primarily the state) based on the results of the past year. That is, it turns out that the company will pay the state in a different form what it should have transferred in the form of dividends. “Therefore, it is absolutely illogical to count these 1.2 trillion as an “achievement” for 2022. If we take it honestly, then Gazprom’s tax payments as a result of its activities in the outgoing year will amount to about 3.8 trillion rubles,” says Valery Andrianov, an expert at the InfoTEK analytical center, associate professor at the Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation, in an article for “Independent newspaper”.

Recall that the company submits consolidated financial statements, which means that the oil subsidiary also has a significant contribution to this. Tax payments by Gazprom Neft in 2021 amounted to about 1 trillion rubles. with the total amount of taxes of the Gazprom group at the level of 3.31 trillion rubles. in the same year. Taking into account the generous dividends that Gazprom Neft plans to pay for the first 9 months of 2022 (69.78 rubles per share), analysts predict a significant increase in the oil company’s profit for the year (about 74%), and hence tax payments, which largely explains the super-positive forecasts for Gazprom’s budget payments.

“So, out of 3.8 trillion rubles. “real” tax payments of the gas monopoly for 2022 at least 1 trillion rubles. will fall on Gazprom Neft, which means on Gazprom itself – only 2.8 trillion rubles,” Andrianov calculated.

“MET on gas for oil companies is much lower than for Gazprom, so the gas monopoly transfers the development of a number of its gas fields to its subsidiary, Gazprom Neft, formally an oil company. As Andrianov emphasized, taking into account this legal nuance, as well as the reporting of the largest power plants, also owned by the gas monopoly and merged into Gazprom Energoholding, the real amount of tax payments by the concern would be even less, ”quotes the IZ.RU expert.

So who is the largest payer of taxes to the Russian budget? Analysts agree that the contribution to the budget of oil companies is much more significant. The fact is that the tax burden on oil production and processing is the highest in comparison with other industries.

“In fact, today Rosneft confidently overtakes Gazprom in terms of payments to the budget. According to the results of the first half of this year, they amounted to 2.1 trillion rubles from the oil company, and we can safely predict that over the entire year they will reach more than 4 trillion,” Rustam, a member of the Chamber of Commerce and Industry Committee on Energy Strategy and Development of the Fuel and Energy Complex, told Expert Tankaev.

And this despite the fact that oil prices in 2022 did not break historical records, unlike gas prices.

The gas monopoly traditionally does not agree with the conclusions of industry experts. In 2016, the official representative of Gazprom, Sergey Kupriyanov, commented to journalists on the company’s loss of the status of “the most expensive company in the country”: “This is a state of mind, not numbers on the monitor screen.”

Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Energy Committee Mikhail Delyagin, in turn, believes that Gazprom was simply lucky. “Panic attempts by European consumers to stock up on gas for the winter and external geopolitical tensions have driven up the price of natural gas to unprecedented heights, which is the financial “success” of the gas monopoly,” he said to IZ.RU.

“According to his calculations, from 2017 to 2021, the oil company paid a total of more than 16.5 trillion rubles in taxes, while Gazprom paid about 14 trillion. And it is unlikely that the latter will be able to increase the rate under the sanctions, Delyagin believes. In his opinion, in 2023, when Gazprom will be deprived of its main sales market – the European one – this gap will deepen even more.

According to the calculations of the InfoTEK analytical center, in 2023 additional tax exemptions for the oil industry will amount to 420 billion rubles. As a result, the tax burden on the oil industry will increase from 73% to 75% of revenue. Payments for the gas industry will also increase, but all the same, the level of withdrawal for it will rise to only 68%, which, you see, is much lower than in the oil industry.