OREANDA-NEWS. December 15, 2008. The Gazprom Management Committee considered information on the activities related to the development of gas exchange trading and the Mezhregiongaz Electronic Trading Platform (ETP).

The Company’s relevant business units were entrusted as follows:
to continue cooperation with federal executive authorities on coordination and ratification during this year of the draft Russian Government directive regarding natural gas exchange trading and electronic trading;
once the Russian Government ratifies the directive on natural gas exchange trading and electronic trading, to elaborate the proposals on the possibility of allocating the required resources in the 2009 Russian Gas Balance and Gas Transmission Scheme in order to sell these resources at the Natural Gas Exchange being established and to develop the Mezhregiongaz ETP.

The meeting noted that Mezhregiongaz had done a lot to improve the electronic trading system in 2008. The integration of hardware and software systems of the ETP with the Gazenergoprombank financial and accounting system allowed the automation of all the operations related to transactions, payments, accounts and guidelines development for gas shipment that resulted in reducing the full cycle from 10 days to 3.5 hours. Mezhregiongaz has almost completed the development of the hardware and software systems for the Natural Gas Exchange trading system.