Published by Global Banking & Finance Review®
Posted on November 13, 2025
2 min readLast updated: January 21, 2026
MOL is considering acquiring Gazprom's stake in Serbia's NIS, which is under US sanctions. This could shift the ownership dynamics of Serbia's sole oil refinery.
BELGRADE (Reuters) -Hungary's MOL oil company is considering buying Gazprom's 11.3% stake in Serbian oil firm NIS which is under U.S. sanctions, the Belgrade-based NIN weekly reported on Thursday, citing sources.
Russia's Gazprom Neft holds 44.9% and Gazprom has an 11.3% stake in NIS, which operates Serbia's only oil refinery. The Serbian government has 29.9% of the shares, while the remainder belongs to small shareholders and employees.
The purchase would make Gazprom Neft a minority stakeholder, the NIN report said, adding that the deal could be discussed in Budapest on November 15.
A MOL spokesman declined to comment on "market rumours".
Earlier this week, Serbia's Energy Minister Dubravka Djedovic Handanovic said the two Russian companies sent a request to the U.S. Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, stating that they are ready to cede control to a third party.
Officials from NIS could not be immediately reached for a comment.
The U.S. Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) initially placed sanctions on Russia's oil sector in January, but for NIS, they were postponed several times and finally came into effect on October 8. Banks have stopped processing NIS payments, and Croatia's JANAF pipeline stopped delivering crude oil.
(Reporting by Aleksandar Vasovic in Belgrade; additional reporting by Gergely Szakacs in Budapest;Editing by Elaine Hardcastle)
Gazprom is a state-owned energy company in Russia, primarily involved in the extraction, production, and distribution of natural gas and oil.
An oil refinery is an industrial facility that processes crude oil into useful products such as gasoline, diesel, and other petrochemicals.
A minority stake refers to owning less than 50% of a company's shares, which typically does not provide control over company decisions.
Foreign investment involves investing capital in a country by individuals or entities from another country, often to gain ownership or control of local businesses.
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