The heads of Rosneft and Gazprom Igor Sechin and Alexey Miller have requested that financial deals, intragroup deals, and real estate deals be exempted from the provisions of Russia’s existing law on purchases of goods, labor, and services.

The request is contained in a joint letter addressed to Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, a source in the financial and economic wing of the government told Interfax.

Sechin signed the letter on January 27, when Sechin and Miller were reported to have met at Gazprom’s home office, and Miller signed it at the beginning of February, the source said.

The authors of the letter argue that the 2012 law on state company purchases has been amended more than 10 times, but “due to the requirements imposed on the ordering companies, including the structures and the business organizations they control, as well as the current macroeconomic situation, an urgent need to further refine it has once more arisen.”

The letter points out that among the requirements for procurement procedures, the law stipulates for a timely disclosure of information as to the terms of all planned contracts. The application of these requirements to the purchases of financial services or other financial deals by the companies, which have been targeted by the U.S. and the E.U. sanctions, reduces their ability to operate in a timely and effective manner and creates risks “of the use of the information disclosed by the authorities in the U.S. and the E.U. to monitor compliance of the sanctioned companies with the sanctions regime.” These measures – the heads of Gazprom and Rosneft argue – could result in a tightening of sanctions and the application of supplementary restrictions in relation to the two companies and the banks that provide services to them.