‘We are having particularly many problems with unpaid gas bills this year. The main problem is that the municipalities just can’t use the so-called lax credits since the regional budget hasn’t got the money for this,’ Uralsevergas’s press officer Oleg Vlasov said to UrBC.

‘Our customers used to owe us not more than 1 billion RUR last summer (700 to 800 million RUR at the most), but now their debts come to 1.1 billion RUR. If a company has a large debt and is not trying to pay it back, we have to stop supplying them with natural gas, partially or completely. Among such companies are the housing maintenance and utilities services of Alapaevskiy, Beloyarskiy, Gornouralskiy, Ivdelskiy, Kushvinskiy, Malyshevskiy, Nevyanskiy, Novolyalinskiy, Pyshminskiy, Rezhevskoy, Tavdinskiy, Talistskiy, Verkh Neivinckiy, and Volchanskiy municipalities and Alapaevsk, Irbit, Verkhnyaya Tura, Degtyarsk, Karpinsk, Krasnouralsk, and Revda,’ he said.