New Serbian firm offers 2 billion euros for stake in NIS refinery

A newly formed Serbian company has offered 2 billion euros, about $2.35 billion, for Gazprom Neft and Gazprom’s combined 56.1 percent stake in NIS, the oil company that operates Serbia’s only refinery. Owner Ranko Mimovic said the bid had been generally accepted by the Russian owners, putting a little-known local buyer at the center of one of the Balkans’ most politically sensitive energy transactions.

The offer lands at a moment when NIS is already under heavy pressure from sanctions and geopolitics. U.S. sanctions on the company took full effect on October 9, 2025, after repeated delays, and the ownership structure around the Serbian refiner has become a live test of how far Moscow-linked assets can be shifted, sold or rebranded outside Russia. For Serbia, the question is not only who pays for the stake, but whether the transaction changes real control over fuel supply and leverage in a country that depends on NIS for a critical part of its energy system.

NIS traces its history back to 1945 and says its headquarters and main assets are in Serbia. The company says it employs about 13,500 people and runs more than 400 petrol stations across the Balkans under the NIS Petrol and Gazprom brands, while also trading electricity in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Romania, Slovenia and Hungary. Its share capital stands at 81,530,200,000 dinars, divided into 163,060,400 ordinary shares.

Gazprom Neft became a shareholder in 2009 under an interstate sales agreement between Serbia and Russia, when Serbia sold 51 percent of NIS. NIS later said Gazprom Neft reduced its stake from 56.15 percent to 50 percent in a 2022 stock-exchange transaction. That history makes the current bid especially sensitive: any transfer of the Russian stake would not just be a corporate sale, but a shift in a strategic asset that has long tied Belgrade to Moscow.

The new Serbian bidder also enters a broader contest that is already underway. Serbia’s energy minister, Dubravka Đedović Handanović, said in May 2026 that sale talks for the Russian stake were expected to be finalized around May 16, 2026, and earlier negotiations had already pointed to interest from Hungary’s MOL Group. The appearance of another bidder suggests the NIS process has become a wider struggle over sanctions enforcement, regional energy dependence and Serbia’s balancing act between Russia, Hungary, the United States and the European market.