• Giant steel maker about to halt due to gas shortage
    http://www.kyivpost.com/content/business/giant-steel-maker-about-to-halt-due-to-gas-shortage-379917.html

    Ukraine’s natural gas-dependent steel making industry faces huge obstacles as the energy crisis deepens. Illich Iron and Steel Works, a Mariupol-based steel producer, is preparing to shut down as the amount of gas in the storage hit a critically low level.

    This is a direct result of company’s debts.

    The plant “is on the brink of having to shut down due to a halt of natural gas supplies by the gas companies,” Illich’s chief executive officer Yuriy Zinchenko wrote on Facebook late at night on Feb. 7.
    (…)
    Zinchenko claims that government owes Illich twice what it owes for the gas supplies. It hasn’t reimbursed the value added tax, a fiscal instrument that is supposed to be paid back if the goods are being exported.
    (…)
    Illich plant, founded in 1897, is a publicly traded company that is a part of Metinvest, a steel holding belonging to the nation’s richest man Rinat Akhmetov and Vadym Novinsky, a former Russian who was granted Ukrainian citizenship by an ex-President Viktor Yanukovych.

    Nikopol-Mariupol Mining and Metallurgical Society, estd 1897 by MM. Rothstein and Smith.

    L’autre filiale de Metinvest à Marioupol serait aussi sur le point de fermer, du fait de dégâts provoqués par les bombardements.

    Azovstal, another steel plant in Mariupol that belongs to Metinvest, is about to stop too, Zinchenko claims. Jan. 24 shelling led to substantial damages, some of the staff got killed, according to Azovstal head Enver Zkitishvili.