TRANSNEFT RESPONSIBILITY
The toxic chemicals polluted the Druzhba pipeline, one of the main trunk routes along which Russia, the world's second largest oil exporter, sends crude to customers in countries including Germany, Poland and Hungary.
European refiners had to halt work for fear the contaminated crude would damage their equipment. The disruption sent oil to a six-month high above $75 a barrel.
At an April 30 meeting with Putin, Transneft boss Tokarev said the contamination was the fault of an unnamed local oil company that supplied poor-quality oil as part of a criminal scheme.
The firm to blame for the contamination "takes care of the quality of this oil, the certification of that quality, and then transmitting it into the trunk pipeline network", Tokarev was quoted as telling Putin in a transcript released by the Kremlin.
The alarm was first raised about the contamination on April 19 after the tainted oil reached Russia's western neighbour Belarus. The oil would have taken around eight days to travel the roughly 1,000 km from the Samara region, based on the average speed at which oil flows through the pipeline.
Reuters was unable to determine whether the documents seen by Reuters covered all the oil delivered into the pipeline network by Nefteperevalka at the terminal, and whether there were volumes of oil that had not been subject to testing.
One of three certificates for April 20 stated that the level of organic chlorides in oil delivered by Nefteperevalka was more than 10 parts per million, above the maximum permissible level under state-mandated standards of below 10 ppm.
Nefteperevalka can process 2,800 tonnes a day. Belarus said some 5 million tonnes of oil were contaminated with organic chloride whose levels exceeded 100 ppm and were sometimes as high as 300 ppm.
Transneft issued its first statement about the contamination on April 26, seven days after the crisis erupted.
