ANKARA: Russian state owned company Gazprom has increased natural gas prices for Turkish private distributors to a level that fails to account for the recent near-50 percent drop in global oil prices.
Gazprom, which supplies 10 billion cubic meters of natural gas to private Turkish companies a year, has increased the price of gas per cubic meter by $68 to $374, the accepted figure – before oil prices began to plummet.
According to an agreement signed by Gazprom and Turkish companies in 2013, the price of a cubic meter was to be $340 in 2014 and $374 in 2015. But the Russian producer later reduced the price to $306 for one year from January 2014. That decrease led Turkish distributors to expect an additional discount on the price for 2015 because one of the key determinants for the price of natural gas is the price of crude oil in world markets.
