North West Oil Group, Inc. (NWOL)

[Prime Saber]

Oilmen to Pass Licenses Easily

It's dated 10/5/06, but applies to NWOG the parent company and its subsidiaries. Licenses can be swapped around more easily among them, and I think NWOG is in that mentioned "group of companies" in the last paragraph:

http://www.kommersant.com/p710396/Oilmen_Licenses/

The lower house of Russia’s parliament, State Duma, passed in the third reading yesterday the amendments to the Subsoil Act that would facilitate handing over licenses for oil fields and deposits of useful minerals and enable to pass them easily from the parent company to its subsidiary and vice versa.

State Duma’s deputies voted Wednesday for amending the Subsoil Act and sanctioned passing licenses “from an entity that is the subsoil user to an entity that is its subsidiary” and vice versa.

Pursuant to the current legislation, the license could be transferred provided one company takes over another or in case of the merger or split-over but if a new entity continues operating under the license agreement. Handing over a license to a subsidiary with all mergers and takeovers duly accomplished may take up to two years today.

The biggest subsoil operators, the oil companies, hailed new amendments. “The news is good,” said LUKOIL spokesman Vladimir Semakov. “There are lots of cases in activities of our company when one of our enterprises has operated on the field, which happens then within the range of actions of another subsidiary.”

The oilmen forecast turnover of licenses will step up once the act is amended. They say that after a while a group of companies will emerge focusing on developing the subsoil that lost its attraction to the biggest companies of the industry.