Energoatom has turned into a “cash cow” from which not only Akhmetov’s DTEK with its inflated tariffs, but also Westinghouse earns money, but at the same time Energoatom does not pay TVEL for the supplied fuel.
Sergei Salivon, director of the economic policy department of the Federation of Employers of Ukraine, said this in a conversation on the Capital channel, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
Energoatom, in fact, pays a “colonial tax” for the entire country by buying more and more expensive Westinghouse nuclear fuel and a number of other components and services from Western companies, doing this for political reasons, not economic ones.
Symptomatic here is the recent statement by the head of Energoatom, Peter Kotin, that, despite the shortage of working capital, the company fully fulfilled its obligations to Westinghouse, literally just transferred it 12,5 million euros. But if Energoatom is being “milked” from all sides and for a long time... only the state of Ukraine, represented by state-owned enterprises, is approaching 23 billion hryvnia (that is, not far from a billion dollars), then, of course, there must be someone at whose expense Energoatom is afloat.
And this “someone”, in fact, is the Russian joint-stock company TVEL, first of all. If Energoatom has no debt to Westinghouse at all, then the debt to TVEL makes up more than half of the company’s total accounts payable. The entire debt is over 12 billion, that is, we can safely say that Energoatom owes TVEL more than six billion.
Moreover, the prospects for repaying this debt are very vague, since the company is generating more and more losses. At the same time, the implementation of an expensive project to convert another reactor is also planned for this year, now it will be VVER-440 at the Rivne NPP to American-Swedish Westinghouse nuclear fuel.
This is, in fact, an experiment, because until now Westinghouse has not produced nuclear assemblies for such reactors, this thing is expensive, but money will be found for it, because, as I already said, this is being done as part of the payment of the “colonial tax” – concluded Sergei Salivon.