Essar Oil UK, the operator of Britain’s Stanlow petroleum refinery , is in talks with UK authorities over extending a January deadline to repay many many pounds in deferred taxes, the corporate said on Sunday.
Essar Oil said it still needed to pay 223 million pounds ($305 million) to HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) by January, confirming an earlier report within the Sunday Times newspaper https://bit.ly/39AwwmG, which said the corporate had used the government’s pandemic VAT deferral scheme last year.
Essar, in response to a Reuters request for comment, said that it had already repaid HMRC 547 million pounds out of a complete 770 million pounds.
The company had agreed an accelerated schedule with HMRC to form the remainder of the payment, which it’s not been ready to meet thanks to a slower than expected recovery from the pandemic.
In a statement to Reuters, Essar said it’s in discussions with HMRC over a “short extension” to form the deferred VAT payments.
“Those discussions are positive and EOUK looks forward to a resolution soon,” it added.
It also said that the corporate had returned to positive EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortisation) and thus is during a “much stronger position to weather the continued challenge presented by the pandemic”.
Essar in May secured quite $850 million in financing https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/essar-oil-uk-agrees-850-million-financing-2021-05-21 for the Stanlow refinery after hitting short-term financial difficulties.
Stanlow, which employs 900 people directly and an extra 800 contractors on site, supplies road fuel to northwest England, and jet fuel to Manchester and Birmingham airports.
Lengthy queues of vehicles https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/behave-normally-uk-transport-minister-tells-britons-queuing-fuel-2021-09-26 are snaking their thanks to gas stations in Britain where an acute shortage of truck drivers has led to fuel rationing during a number of garages and a few pumps running dry, and prompted the govt to think about issuing temporary work visas.
