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Media speculations appear that Lukoil in Burgas will be bought by Azerbaijan's SOCAR

Photo: Reuters

The Azerbaijani state oil company SOCAR is the most likely buyer of the Lukoil Neftohim Burgas refinery, reported the site of the Trud newspaper. At the end of April 2023, SOCAR opened an office in Sofia in the presence of the presidents of Bulgaria and Azerbaijan, Rumen Radev and Ilham Aliyev. At the same time, the Commission for Energy and Water Regulation granted a license to SOCAR Trading Gas and Power to trade natural gas on the Bulgarian market, Trud daily writes.

The famous economist Evgeny Kanev was the first to predict that the buyer would be SOCAR. He was joined on December 6 by Delyan Dobrev, the deputy from GERB, who is the chairman of the energy commission in the Parliament, according to the website of the Sega newspaper.

"Due to the geographical specifics of the production in Burgas and the logistics of supplying it with raw materials, the comments from the industry are that some interest in the refinery may come mainly from the Black Sea region, where the strong positions are held by the Azerbaijani state oil company SOCAR, which has a huge refinery in Turkey, and to Kazakhstan's KazMunayGas, owner of Romanian Rompetrol," wrote Capital.

SOCAR recently entered into an agreement with Russia's Lukoil, Reuters reported, according to which the Russian oil company will lend SOCAR $1.5 billion and supply SOCAR's STAR oil refinery in Turkey with up to 200,000 barrels per day of Russian crude oil.



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