Reuters—Essar Oil UK, the operator of Britain’s Stanlow oil refinery, is in talks with UK authorities over extending a January deadline to repay hundreds of millions of pounds in deferred taxes, the company said on Sunday. Essar Oil said it still needed to pay £223 million ($305 million) to HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) by January, confirming an earlier report in the Sunday Times newspaper, which said the company had used the government’s pandemic VAT deferral scheme last year. Essar, in response to a Reuters request for comment, said that it had already repaid HMRC £547 million ($749 million) out of a total of £770 million ($1.05 billion). The company had agreed to an accelerated schedule with HMRC to make the rest of the payment, which it has not been able to meet due to a slower than expected recovery from the pandemic. In a statement to Reuters, Essar said …