By 2013-2014 Turkey intends to refuse of "take and pay" principle of the contract of the gas deliveries with Azerbaijan, Taner Yildiz, Turkish Minister of Energy and Resources, told Turkish The Liranewspaper.
"By 2013-2014 Turkey intends to refuse of use gas deliveries on the basis of "take and pay" principle both with Azerbaijan and Iran," said Yildiz.
Turkey also plans to terminate the contract on the basis of the same principle concluded with Iran in 2013, he added.
The Azerbaijan Centre of Oil Studies told Turan that the Turkish Minister's statement is not surprising. "Since the beginning of Azerbaijani gas deliveries to the Turkish market on July 3, 2007 till this year the neighboring country has never met its obligations on the volume of gas purchase within the commercial agreement of Stage-1 Shah-Deniz project. According to this agreement, in 2008 Turkish state company Botas committed itself to buy minimum of 6.3 billion cub.m. of gas delivered via the Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum pipeline," a source from the Centre said.
According to the Centre, only once in 2009 Turkey imported 5.1 billion cub.m. of Azerbaijani gas. Later on the volume of gas import kept on declining and in 2011 totaled 3.8 billion cub.m. During 9 months, 2012 the volume of gas import to Turkey reached 2.4 billion cub.m., down 10% against the same period last year.
Asked by Turan's correspondent "why economic sanctions are not applied against Turkey," a source from the Centre said that the contract envisages the fines and last year Turkey paid Azerbaijan 93 million Euro for the volume of gas it failed to import.
"However, both Azerbaijani officials and partners of the consortium understand that their main goal is to implement Stage-2 project. Therefore, one can suppose that the "take and pay" principle will be removed from the commercial agreement of Stage-1 project. On the other side, there is no sense to apply this principle, if it is not observed in practice," a source from the Centre said.
* The commercial agreement between the Shah-Deniz project partners and Turkish Botas state company was signed on March 12, 2001 in Ankara. The term of the contract is 16 years since stable import of Azerbaijani gas to the Turkish market.The maximum volume of import was fixed at 6.6 billion cub.m. of gas a year. Azerbaijan Gas Supply Company, operated by Norwegian Statoil, is in charge of sale of gas from the Stage-1 Shah-Deniz project.-0-
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