OREANDA-NEWS. April 18, 2012. ITERA offered the Sverdlovsk Region Administration a plan to settle indebtedness by consumers in the Region worth Rubles 4.845 billion. This is what the Company reported in result of the meeting held by Alexander Misharin, Governor of the Sverdlovsk Region. Vladimir Makeyev, head of ITERA Oil and Gas Company, took part in the meeting, reported the press-centre of ITERA.

Rubles 4.143 billion or over 85 per cent the total indebtedness accounts for enterprises of housing and utilities infrastructure.

Uralsevergaz, ITERA affiliate, supplies natural gas to consumers in the Region. Uralsevergaz suggested a number of measures to help solve the problem of indebtedness housing and utilities infrastructure enterprises have for natural gas they consume.

The supplier proposed a transition to gas supply agreements to be signed with debtors for a season. The current agreements shall lap this coming May and the new ones are not going to be signed unless an issue of paying the previously supplied gas is settled; the gas supply agreements are going to be signed only with enterprises of housing and utilities infrastructure that own gas-consuming equipment. As an alternative, a joint responsibility of lessors of this kind of equipment in line with obligations by leaseholders should be set as a standard; Uralsevergaz and a corresponding municipal formation might sign a contract to supply a municipality with a volume of gas it needed to meet the demand of problem-prone consumers of housing and utilities infrastructure.

Moreover, introduction of limited gas-supply to debtors after completion of a heating season, which is practiced as the most efficient method to force debtors to pay the gas they consumed, was discussed at the meeting.