Russian oil spill cleanup to stretch into next year, Nornickel CEO says

• Norilsk Nickel (OTCPK:NILSY -1%) CEO Vladimir Potanin says it is impossible to estimate the cost of damages from May's Arctic fuel spill until the miner completes the clean-up, which may extend into next year.
• "How much fuel actually is left in the rivers and how much the ecosystem can be restored, that still has to be assessed," Potanin tells Bloomberg.
• The CEO says there will now be zero tolerance to breaching ecological protocols and stricter ecology key performance indicators for company management.
• Nornickel plans to spend 13B rubles in the next two years to replace and upgrade infrastructure, and aims to ship in fuel when needed to cut down on the amount stored in tanks, Potanin says.
• Nornickel has set aside $2.1B after Russia's ecological watchdog said the company should pay for the damage caused by the spill of ~150K barrels of diesel from a storage tank into a river system; the miner is challenging the size of the fine.