The ruling of Kyiv's administrative court of appeals that deprives national joint-stock company Naftogaz Ukrainy of the right to develop Budyschansko-Chutivsky, Obolonsky and Pysarivsky gas sites would result in large losses of the national budget and local budgets of Poltava region in coming years.

"Over the five years of preparing these sites for production, Naftogaz has invested about UAH 800 million in exploration and preparatory work." The plans for 2017 envisaged investing another UAH 1.1 billion. As a result of the court's decision, the company may lose these funds," Naftogaz said.

Naftogaz draws attention to the danger of returning to practice the opaque distribution of the land parcels seized from state-owned companies among private entities. According to the information available to the company, some private companies have already prepared applications for the sites seized from Naftogaz.

The press service also said that the annulment of permits for use of these areas will in fact mean a failure of the 20/20 government program. So during the period of special permits, 69.6 billion cubic meters of gas and 10.7 million tonnes of oil and gas condensate were planned to be produced in these licensed areas. Only royalty payments to the national budget were supposed to be more than UAH 148 billion and over UAH 7.4 billion could have been injected to the local budgets of Poltava region.

According to Naftogaz, the annulment of special permits was initiated by the State Service for Geology and Deposits of Ukraine, to which the deputies of the Poltava Regional Council, with the support of people's deputy Serhiy Kaplin, applied with a corresponding petition in 2016.

The authority suspended the special permits without any inspection in violation of the procedure.