Gas leaks to the exchange.

But the free prices coincided with the tariffs.

After six years gas exchange trading has resumed in Russia. On Friday a symbolic 21 million cubic meters were sold at the St. Petersburg International Commodity Exchange, and the price is almost coincided with the regulated tariffs. The officials and the market participants were confident that in a surplus of gas in the domestic market it would be cheaper to buy it on the stock exchange than via a long-term contracts. But, according to the analysts, the impact of trading on the market may yet to be too small, the situation can change in a few years.

On Friday gas exchange trades launched at the St. Petersburg International Mercantile Exchange (SPIMEX), which were discussed for two years and after the June orders of Vladimir Putin were done in four months. Igor Sechin, the President of "Rosneft" and the head of the SPIMEX board of directors, Valery Golubev, the Deputy Chairman of "Gazprom", Anatoly Golomolzin, the Deputy Head of FAS, Sergey Shvetsov, the first deputy chairman, and Kirill Molodtsov, the deputy head of the RF Ministry of Energy, were present at the ceremony, together clicked the button of the ritualistic "compressor station", symbolically marking the beginning of the trades. Igor Sechin, according to "the Kommersant", pressed a button with obvious pleasure, which, however, we could not say for sure about other attendees. Some of them may recall that they actively ignored the project in the previous years, and some altogether pushed in the opposite direction.