On 13 September 2006 in the office of non-profit organization "Association of Suppliers of Oil and Gas Industry "Murmanshelf" there took place the signing of a cooperation agreement between the "Murmanshelf" association represented by director general Mr. Grigory Ivanovich Stratiy and "Petro Arktik" association (Norway) represented by director Mr. Jan Egil Sorensen. Before the procedure of the official signing of the agreement, Grigory Ivanovich and Jan Sorensen described the objectives and prospects of the cooperation development in two countries to the journalists.

"Petro Arktik" is the largest North-Norwegian association which includes 340 enterprises and has 10-years working experience in the field of oil and gas — tells the director general of "Murmanshelf. The enterprises of the Murmansk region unfortunately do not yet have such experiences.

The cooperation between "Petro Arktik" and "Murmanshelf" is intended to expand the competence of enterprises of oil and gas field of our region. Due to signing of this agreement we certainly expect to learn from the experiences of Norwegian colleagues in order to improve awareness and professional skills of the specialists of Murmansk Region to maximum extent.

Positioning of an enterprise as of an oil and gas supplier is quite a new strategy for 99 per cent of Murmansk enterprises, and the specialists of "Petro Arktik" have a lot to share. They have been learning, uniting, and improving their knowledge, initiating different educational programmes in order to train the necessary staff for oil and gas field in Murmansk region.

The general idea of the signed agreement is an agreement on cooperation and interaction with related in the field of activity company "Petro Arktik".

The task which the management of non-profit organization "Association "Murmanshelf set before them is to improve the level of knowledge of the specialists and thus to improve the quality of the implemented work. "Petro Arktik" association will assist Russian enterprises in finding partners and arranging commercial contacts. It has been a year since we started the cooperation with the Norwegian association and signing of the agreement is the logical finalization of our preliminary negotiations.

In the framework of the signed agreement we have planned specific activities. We will hold joint activities in the framework of the "SevTEK" exhibition which will take place in November 2006. It is planned to have a small seminar with the participation of the members of Norwegian and Russian associations. I do not exclude that in the future our cooperation will lead to the creation of joint enterprises.

The main objective of the Norwegian party — the director of the "Petro Arktik" association Mr. Jan Egil Sorensen entered the discussion — is the development of cooperation platform for the cooperation of Norwegian and Russian companies. Both sides have equal information and thus there exist the opportunities for the implementation of joint projects. The experiences which we used in Norway in our time were extremely useful for the implementation of the oil and gas project, including the Stockman field. We hope to attract Russian companies to our projects.

After the talk with the journalists the sides have officially signed the cooperation agreement and strengthened it by hand shake.

Ms. Olga Shmatova was present at the meeting