March 18, 2009 By Grigory Pasko

Grigory Pasko: Comrade Sechin Gets a Good Oil Deal with China?

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Comrade Sechin, the oil economist?

Grigory Pasko, journalist

Inasmuch as I’m not an economist, I didn’t pay much attention to a report from the Bloomberg agency. However, there are more observant people on Live Journal. One of them, a certain “rusanalit“, did notice a Feb. 17 report from Bloomberg about Russia’s seemingly desperate long-term oil deal with China (20 years, $25 billion credit, 15 metric tonnes a year supplied).

Subsequently, this Livejournal user rusanalit decided to do some calculations. And here’s what he came up with:

Term of the contract – 20 years.
Annual delivery – 15 mln. metric tons.
Payment – 25 bln. dollars.

Calculation: 20 years x 15 mln.metric tons * 7.3 barrels per metric ton = 2.2 bln. barrels that Russia will deliver to China for 25 bln.dollars.

That is, Russia has sold 1 barrel to China at 11 dollars!

Conclusions:

1.Bloomberg is lying or did not quite understand.
2. China squeezed Russia to the maximum, having obtained a price four times below the current one.
3. There’s a huge kickback built in there. Several tens of billions of dollars.