Hormuz squeeze on ammonia draws foreign bidders to Odesa Port Plant

Corporate/Energy — Ukraine

Four foreign companies from the US, Asia and the Middle East are studying data on Ukraine's state-owned Odesa Port Plant (OPP) ahead of its possible privatisation auction later this year, Dmytro Natalukha, head of the State Property Fund of Ukraine (SPFU), said on July 29.

All four have signed non-disclosure agreements giving them access to the ammonia producer's data.

The closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which about 30% of global ammonia supplies normally pass, has created a market deficit in fertilisers almost from the first day of Operation Epic Fury and pushed up ammonia prices — turning a plant that had struggled to find a buyer for years into a more attractive target for producers looking to hedge their exposure to the chokepoint.

The privatisation auction is scheduled for October 19. Ukraine's cabinet cut the plant's starting price by 4% in July, to UAH4.3bn ($96mn), citing direct damage the war-battered enterprise has suffered — a marked step down from the $107mn (UAH4.5bn) starting bid set when the sale was first relaunched in August 2025.

Kyiv has repeatedly tried and failed to privatise the Black Sea complex – one of the most valuable assets on the privatisation docket - since the 2010s; before the war it was among Ukraine's largest ammonia and urea exporters, but its main production lines have been shut for years, with the plant reduced to supplying oxygen, nitrogen and port services.

In effect, war losses that once depressed the plant's value are now being priced into the deal as a starting discount, while the Hormuz-driven supply squeeze is doing the work of attracting bidders that a decade of failed privatisation attempts could not.

The effort to privatise the Odesa Port Plant (OPP) actually started in 2009, when Ukraine’s jailed uber-oligarch Ihor Kolomoisky's company Nortima won that year's tender with a $600mn bid — but the win was never honoured; the state later cancelled the tender, and a Kyiv court subsequently ruled Ukraine had "no valid grounds" not to recognise Nortima as the winner while stopping short of ruling the cancellation itself illegal, effectively scuppering the auction.

That set the pattern for the next decade: Nortima spent years threatening to block any future sale as a "purchase of stolen assets," and Kolomoisky's shadow claim became the standing legal cloud over the asset, compounded by $251mn in debt the plant separately owed to oligarch Dmytro Firtash's Ostchem — a classic case of one oligarch's legal claim and another's debt-loading combining to scare off real buyers, as IntelliNews wrote in 2018.

The state ran two more failed tenders in 2016 (July, then December) under the "flagship" post-Maidan privatisation drive — both failed for lack of bids, the first so publicly it triggered an overhaul of Ukraine's privatisation legislation.

Prime Minister Volodymyr Groysman then aimed for a sale by end-2017, blaming the earlier failures on "inefficient" State Property Fund management and citing the Kolomoisky/Nortima conflict directly as the reason it kept failing; the starting price was cut roughly tenfold, to $54mn, by 2018 as buyer interest evaporated.

The plant then cycled through repeated re-listings — relaunched again in 2021, paused by the full-scale invasion, back on the list by 2023, relaunched with a $107mn starting bid in August 2025, and put up again this June–July 2026 with the price trimmed a further 4%, this time drawing genuine foreign interest for the first time in years as the Hormuz blockade squeezed global ammonia supply.

In all the plant has been through: one voided 2009 tender plus at least two more formally failed tenders (2016 x2), then roughly five further re-listing/relaunch attempts (2017, 2018, 2021, 2023, 2025) before the current 2026 push — the Kolomoisky's Nortima claim, layered on top of Firtash-linked debt, was the recurring legal obstacle preventing the sale. Now the cash-strapped government is going to try again.