EU to lower price cap for Russian oil to $44.10/bbl as of Feb 1

BRUSSELS. Jan 15 (Interfax) - The European Commission is launching a price adjustment procedure for Russian oil.

"Today, the new automatic and dynamic price adjustment procedure for Russian oil will be applied for the first time. The new price cap is $44.10 per barrel and comes into effect on February 1. Starting from January 15, existing contracts concluded under the previous price cap can be executed for 90 days," the EC said in a communique published on Thursday.

The communique states that the cap was lowered from $60 to $47.60 under the 18th sanctions package. Meantime, an automatic and dynamic procedure for setting the future crude oil price cap was introduced.

The new procedure ensures that the cap will always be 15% lower than the average market price of Urals crude oil for the previous reporting period of 22 weeks, the EC said.