Ukrainian shipbuilders will manufacture liquefied natural gas tankers for Russia under an agreement signed on December 17, a Ukrainian deputy prime minister said.
“The Russian Federation is beginning to develop its Arctic coast, and they have ordered gas tankers from us, which will be produced at shipbuilding enterprises in Mykolaiv,” Yuriy Boiko said at a roundtable “Let’s Unite Ukraine” in Kyiv on Friday.
“This is an order worth approximately $4 billion, and we’ll have it in effect until 2020,” he said.
Boiko was referring to one of the agreements reached at a Ukrainian-Russian summit in Moscow on December 17.
His news about gas tankers confirmed earlier reports.
At a meeting in Kyiv on December 13 between Prime Minister Mykola Azarov and Ukrainian business figures, the chief executive of Ukraine’s Smart Holding Group, Oleksiy Pertin, said: “We can expect a major volume of orders [from Russia]. It’s about $4 billion until 2020.”
Pertin said Russia might order gas tankers and trawlers from Smart Holding.
Smart Holding holds a 23.75% stake in mining and steel holding company Metinvest, a 95% stake in the Smart Maritime Group shipbuilder, a 99.97% stake in trading and financial company Santis, and large assets in the energy and property development industries and in agriculture.
Vadim Novinsky is a co-owner and the main beneficiary of Smart Holding, but in July he stepped down as chairman of the company’s supervisory board as he had been elected to parliament.
Boiko also said at the roundtable that Ukraine and Russia are planning to join forces in developing a space rocket that would have capacity for putting payloads of nearly 90 tonnes in orbit, and that meanwhile the Dnepr program continues to be put into practice.
