Current claims of the Petroleum Industry of Serbia have reached 31 billion dinars. Three fourths of the debt should have been repaid a long time ago, but they weren’t, and the interest is being charged on the debt, said Kiril Kravchenko, General Manager of NIS and Vice President of Gaspromneft Executive Board, in an interview for the new issue of the Ekonomist magazine.

„The biggest debtors are the state enterprises Srbijagas, Petrohemija, Jat Airways, Power Industry of Serbia, and transport companies. We have negotiated with each of them; we stopped an increase in claims, made a timetable of paying off the debts. Together with authorized ministries we are trying to launch realization of this plan. It is a very complex issue. It is clear that the situation is bad and there is a deficit in the budget, but we hope that upon the rebalance most of state enterprises will be able to pay off the accumulated debts soon. However, we are going to solve the problem with private enterprises on our own,” Kravchenko said.

Answering the question whether the new major owner of NIS intended to take over some of the debtor-companies or launch their bankruptcy procedure, Kravchenko said that at the moment it was most important for the new management of NIS to solve their own problems first.

„We are analyzing various scenarios, but in most cases we would prefer obtaining money we would direct to development of NIS to saving other companies that operate with losses,“ Kravchenko underlined.