Turkey’s budget swung to a record deficit in December with the government spending an unprecedented amount on gas imports as international prices surged and the lira collapsed.
Boru Hatlari ile Petrol Tasima AS, the national gas import company better known as Botas, received a total of 59 billion liras ($4.4 billion) from the government through loans and transfers in the last month of 2021 alone. No such transfers were made from the budget in 2020.
The central bank also restarted foreign-currency sales to Botas in October after a three-month hiatus, though these are not reflected in the budget figures. It supplied the company with $258 million in October and $2.23 billion in November, a figure that jumped to a whopping $3.4 billion last month, the most in data going back to 2013.
The government said Monday its budget deficit for December more than tripled on an annual basis to 145.7 billion liras on the back of the gas import bill. That brings the total deficit for 2021 to 192.2 billion liras.
Turkey’s national gas company is trying to raise billions of dollars to pay an import bill due early this year, Bloomberg reported earlier this month.
European have risen to records in recent weeks amid supply disruptions and a sharp rise in demand as economies reopen from the coronavirus pandemic. The crisis has hammered gas distributors across Europe. Several in the U.K. have collapsed, while German energy giant Uniper SE this month said it was forced to borrow billions to pay down margin calls.
Turkey has been hard hit as rising energy prices coincided with a 44% decline in the value of the lira last year. December was the most tumultuous month in decades for the currency, however, leading to major losses.
Turkey has made significant gas discoveries in the Black Sea that may eventually reduce its dependence on imports. But the government has said they won’t start gas production before next year.
Botas buys almost half of Turkey’s gas, mostly via long-term contracts with Gazprom. It also purchases piped gas from Azerbaijan and Iran and liquefied natural gas from Nigeria and Algeria.
The Turkish company signed a new four-year deal with Gazprom Export for the supply of as much as 5.75 billion cubic meters a year through the Turk Stream pipeline starting Jan. 1.
Botas raised natural gas prices to industry multiple times but refrained from hiking prices last year to households already struggling with double digit inflation. It raised prices by 25% for households, by 15% for power plants and by 50% for factories from Jan. 1 to help stem losses.
The difference between purchase and selling prices probably caused a loss of as much as $7 billion in 2021, according to Ali Arif Akturk, an industry analyst who’s a former Botas executive.
