Open Workshop "Legal Regulation of the Oil and Oil Product Markets"

The Higher School of Economics Graduate School of Law and the HSE-Skolkovo Institute of Law and Development held a joint seminar on the legal routes to improve the efficiency of the oil sector.

Speaker of the workshop was the leading Russian expert on the legal regulation of oil and oil products, Elena Gavrilina. The leading researcher of our Institute Kirill Molodyko moderated the workshop.

Ms. Gavrilina holds a unique professional experience, because she worked for 11 years in Lukoil - first in the legal service, and then as Chief Auditor. After defending her Ph.D. dissertation simultaneously in two legal specialties, she worked as an assistant professor at MGIMO-MFA Russia. In 2017, Elena Gavrilina's new treatise "The System of Contractual Relations in the Oil and Oil Product Market" became one of the bestsellers of the Biblio-Globus trade network.

Elena shared with the audience current information about the processes taking place in the oil industry, the structure of the oil and oil product market, and the system of commercial contracts established in these markets. Thus, the specific features of certain types of relevant contracts were described in detail, separately for the oil market and for the oil product market, taking into account their technological features. Ms. Gavrilina noted that many important sectoral issues continue to be regulated by Soviet legislation, and some have not been settled at all. In some aspects, the legal regulation of the oil industry lags behind the regulation of the electricity market. Elena detailed the legal features related to the activities of vertically integrated oil companies and independent oil companies. After the speech, the speaker answered numerous questions of the hall, from among which a special interest of the audience emerged; the topic of the legal regulation of transboundary oil deposits, as well as geological exploration and production of oil on the continental shelf.

Due to a strategic link in the spirit of hospitality, openness, and publicity, registration for the first time was conducted through the online portal of our partner law.ru (www.zakon.ru). Among the registered were undergraduate students and post-graduate students of various faculties of the HSE, Moscow State University, Kutafin, and the All-Russian Academy of Foreign Trade.