Estonia Grants Oil Shale Industry a Tax Break
Estonia's government is giving the country's oil shale miners a 40 million euro ($44 million) a year tax break to help them weather weaker global oil prices.
The Baltic state is one of the world's largest and oldest miner and processor of oil shale, a rock rich in organic matter called kerogen, which the country has used for more than 50 years to generate the bulk of its electricity.
But low oil prices, coupled with a squeeze on profitability from cheaper power imports from Nordic countries whose prices hit 15-year lows in 2015, have forced companies to lay off hundreds of employees in the politically sensitive northeast of the country.
The government said in a news release on Thursday it would scrap a resource use and environment tax of 0.257 euros a tonne of oil shale rock from July 1, 2016, until a new resource and environment tax based on the global price for oil is introduced in 2018.
($1 = 0.9140 euros)
(Reporting by David Mardiste; Editing by David Holmes)
