Gazprom Continues To Move Offices to City

Gazprom already occupies about 90,000 square meters of office space in the city.

COMBINED REPORTS

Published: April 3, 2013 (Issue # 1753)

ST. PETERSBURG (SPT) — State-owned gas giant Gazprom will soon move two departments to St. Petersburg.

A senior city official said the departments are “gradually starting to be moved and the rest will move eventually,” Vedomosti reported last week.

The unidentified official attributed the move to the company’s plans to relocate its offices to the new Lakhta Center, an 86-storey skyscraper being built for Gazprom in the city.

The skyscraper, with an area of 334,000 square meters, is slated for completion by 2018.

The company’s departments for construction and procurement are “already in the process of moving,” while a third responsible for design work has been built from the ground up in St. Petersburg, Gazprom spokesman Sergei Kupriyanov told Vedomosti.

He said there had been no decision yet regarding other departments.

Andrei Kruglov, head of Gazprom’s finance department, said his department would not be moving anytime soon, Interfax reported Friday.

It was not immediately clear whether the move would be accompanied by new local registration for Gazprom, which would require the company to pay additional city taxes.

Although Kupriyanov said the move was being conducted in agreement with the city, a second city official said the relocation was not being paid for using funds from the city budget.

Vedomosti said employees working in the relocated departments are being paid an additional two to three months’ wages to find housing in the northern capital.

Meanwhile, the Delovoi Peterburg daily reported last week that the number of Gazprom departments in St. Petersburg has also recently been expanded by the transferral of an office of Gazpromneft Marine Bunker to the city. Gazprom Marine Bunker is St. Petersburg’s leader in ship refueling at the city’s port.

The departments have taken over a floor of 1,120 square meters in the Senator business center on Vasilyevsky Island’s Bolshoi Prospekt. Gazprom Marine Bunker needed extra space to transfer its operational administration from Moscow to St. Petersburg, according to Delovoi Peterburg.

Gazprom Marine Bunker, which specializes in fueling ships in 24 Russian ports, has been registered in St. Petersburg since 2007. The company has held a leading position on the city market for a second year while controlling 30 percent of the local bunkering business. However, until recently its operational management has been carried out from its Moscow office.

According to experts, Gazprom departments already occupy about 90,000 square meters of office space in the city. Gazprom Neft moved to St. Petersburg in 2012, while the move of Gazprom Export is to be completed by the end of 2013, Vedomosti reported.

Gazprom’s partial relocation from Moscow may lead to a loss in tax revenue for the city. Gazprom’s tax contributions to budgets at all levels in 2011 totaled 967 billion rubles ($31 billion). In 2012, the funds allocated for Gazprom employees’ salaries and bonuses alone totaled 99.9 million rubles ($3.2 million). Following the relocation of Gazprom’s employees to St. Petersburg, their tax contributions will go to the St. Petersburg budget, Vedomosti reported.

As a strategic partner of St. Petersburg, Gazprom enjoys certain privileges in the city. Therefore when the majority of companies with large advertising billboards on Nevsky Prospekt had to take them down last month to comply with new advertising legislation, Gazprom managed to retain its sign at the corner of Nevsky Prospekt and Ulitsa Sadovaya.