European Commission Vice President Gunter Verheugen (left) gave Russian Minister of Industry and Energy Viktor Khristenko fair warning of problems coming up for Gazprom.
Photo: Леонид Сторожев
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EC Tries to Limit Gazprom Buys Again
European Commission Vice President Gunter Verheugen brought bad news for Gazprom with him when he arrived in Moscow for negotiations at the Ministry of Industry and Energy. Those negotiations are a renewal of talks started in 2005 on coordination of the development of industry and state regulation in the European Union. Verheugen stated that among the goals of the present negotiations are a discussion of Russia's accession to the WTO and preparations for the fall Russia-EU summit, the time and place of which has yet to be announced. The June summit in Samara was not highly successful.
A bilateral agreement on cooperation between Russia and the EU cannot be signed earlier than the spring of 2008, almost certainly after presidential elections in Russia. Verheugen said that, beside a new ten-year cooperation agreement to replace the one that expires in the autumn of this year, he hopes that an economic agreement will be signed as well. He noted that Russia will have to face new rules for European markets, which will affect Gazprom most of all, since the European Commission plans to consider new regulations for the electricity and natural gas markets this autumn.
The last set of EC regulations required that supply be separated from distribution on the gas and electricity market. But, after protests from the French companies GdF and EdF, German E.ON and RWE and Russian Gazprom, the regulations were blocked by the commissioners at the June summit. The mood has changed in the EC now, however, and the changes are likely to be found in the new regulations next April. To add to Gazprom's worries, the European Parliament has instructed the EC to develop measures to limit investment in the energy sector from countries that do not uphold the principle of mutual access. Thus, the next Russian-EU summit may be even tenser than the last one.
www.kommersant.com
All the Article in Russian as of July 17, 2007
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