MOSCOW: The hearing of a tax dispute between Russia and U.S. oil and gas major ExxonMobil at the Stockholm arbitration court has been delayed while the two sides continue talks to try to reach a settlement, Russia’s finance ministry said on April 28.
The court had been due to hear the case, in which Exxon says it overpaid profit taxes on the Sakhalin-1 oil and gas project in Russia’s far east, on April 24-28. “The arbitration proceedings have been postponed for a few months. The parties agreed to continue talks with the aim of resolving outstanding issues before trial,” the ministry said. Exxon lodged its claim for $637 million in over-paid taxes at the Stockholm court in 2015. Russia reduced its profit tax in 2009 to 20% for production-sharing agreements such as Exxon’s Sakhalin-1, but the U.S. energy giant continued to pay at an earlier level of 35 percent after the project broke even in 2008.
