A company from Kazan demanding 1.1bn rubles from Indian oil and gas corporation's subsidiary

As it became known to Realnoe Vremya, the Kazan scientific and production enterprise GKS has filed a lawsuit against the oil and gas production enterprise Nord Imperial of the Imperial Energy group of companies (part of the Indian state corporation ONGC Videsh Limited (OVL)). The amount of the Kazan company's claims is 1,1 billion rubles, the claim has been accepted for production by the Arbitration Court of Tomsk Oblast.

Nord Imperial LLC owed the Kazan company this amount under a contract dated June 13, 2017. In addition to this amount, GKS demands more than 655 thousand penalties and interest of 1,7 million rubles.

The Nord Imperial company develops three oil fields in Siberia. For the most part, it develops the northern and western parts of Tomsk Oblast.

According to the SPARK-Interfax system, the revenue of Nord Imperial at the end of last year amounted to 4 billion rubles, net profit — 9 billion rubles. The company is part of the Imperial Energy Group of Companies, which was founded in 2004 and belongs to the Ministry of Oil and Natural Gas of the Government of India. It also controls the oil and gas production enterprise Alliansneftegaz PLC and service companies — Rus Imperial Group PLC and Imperial Frak Service PLC.

Imperial Energy is a subsidiary of the largest Indian state oil and gas corporation Oil and Natural Gas Corporation Limited (ONGC), which owns a 20% stake in the Sakhalin-1 PSA project. ONGC was founded by the Government of India in 1956, it owns almost 70% of the shares.

Mutual legal claims

GKS scientific and production enterprise is a Kazan engineering company founded in 2006 on the basis of the technopark Idea. Imperial Energy is listed as one of its customers, along with LUKOIL, Transneft, the American-Australian engineering company WorleyParsons Limited.

This is not the first litigation with the Indian partners at GKS. Earlier, they tried to recover 10,5 million rubles of unjustified enrichment and $269 thousand from Nord Imperial, as well as interest for using other people's funds from September 25, 2018 to August 23, 2021 in the amount of more than 1,8 million rubles and almost $31 thousand.

In turn, Nord Imperial filed a counterclaim against the Kazan company. The company demands 576,5 thousand rubles in reimbursement of electricity costs and 215,6 thousand rubles of arrears in payment for transport services. However, the trial was postponed until the end of August.