The obligation of oil, gas and mining companies to publish the details of all payments they make to the state budget will be postponed to 2017 write profit.ro. This obligation has appeared in European legislation since 2013 and Romania should have introduced it in 2016.

That directive requires companies active in natural resources extraction (oil, gas, mining and logging) to report and publicize, in full, all payments over 100,000 euros made to the state authorities, owners of these resources, for each project.

Payments that are to be disclosed are related to the share of proceeds from the sale of production to be transferred to the state, taxes on income, dividends (where states hold participations in projects or operating companies), royalties, bonuses prepaid to authorities before the start of operations and other types of bonuses directly paid to the authorities during exploration and exploitation, writes profit.ro.

“Regarding the application of these provisions, the Ministry of Finance received requests aimed, on the one hand, at the formulation of technical clarifications and, on the other hand, at postponing the application of those provisions. Please note that to date there is no reporting practice or any implementation guide at EU level covering, for example, the structure of the report, the manner and publishing format, scope of payments or the level of aggregation of the information presented”, shows the note accompanying the draft order proposed by the ministry.

The text legislation transposing the Directive into national state law “may provide that the Community provisions apply primarily to financial statements for financial years starting on 1 January 2016 or during 2016. We note that there are Member States which have decided that provisions apply from 1 January 2016. In these circumstances, we believe that the postponement of the application of Chapter 10 of the Directive does not contravene the provisions of the Directive”, also shows the Ministry of Finance, writes profit.ro.