The excitement around the tender for the right to manage the North-West Thermal Power Plant seems to be starting to subside. As Vedomosti has learned, one of the potential contenders, the German concern E.ON, has notified RAO UES of Russia of its refusal to participate in this project. And along with the Germans, the company Lenenergo, which had planned to form an alliance with E.ON to participate in the tender, has also lost interest in the plant.

The manager of the North-West TPP will be determined in a competition, the main criteria of which were approved by the Board of Directors of RAO UES in September. International energy companies with operations in various countries and a turnover of at least $5 billion, owning or managing electric power assets with an installed capacity of at least 5,000 MW, and having a credit rating of at least BBB- on the S&P and Fitch scale and Baa3 on the Moody's scale will be able to participate in it. It is expected that the results of the tender will be summed up next year.

The North-West Thermal Power Plant is to become the first facility that RAO UES will transfer to the management of a large foreign company (possibly in a consortium with a Russian partner). According to RAO UES, about 30 energy companies worldwide meet the criteria for participation in the tender. Nine of them expressed interest in the competition and received an information memorandum from RAO. According to a source close to the energy holding, these are German E.ON and RWE, French EDF, Italian Enel, Belgian Traсtebel EGI, Spanish Union Fenosa, Finnish Fortum, American Entergy and one Asian company (possibly Tokyo Electric Power). RAO UES does not comment on this information.

Officially, only three companies have announced their intention to participate in the tender. Enel created a joint venture with ESN-Energo specifically for this project. EDF signed a memorandum on cooperation in the electric power industry with the Interros group. And E.ON publicly said that it would participate in the tender in alliance with a Russian partner, without naming it.

But yesterday, Lenenergo CEO Andrey Likhachev admitted to Vedomosti that it was his company that was supposed to be E.ON's partner in the North-West TPP project. However, he immediately added that both companies had decided to withdraw from the project. "According to my information, E.ON has decided not to participate in the tender, so Lenenergo's management will not be applying for the plant's management," Likhachev said. A source close to E.ON confirmed this information to Vedomosti. "The company is having too much trouble with the merger deal with Ruhrgas. Therefore, the company does not consider it possible to take responsibility for new projects," Vedomosti's source explained.

A source close to the board of directors of RAO UES admits that a letter officially refusing to participate in the tender was sent by "at least one of the nine companies." In his opinion, there may be more refusals - after all, according to the terms of the competition, the management company does not have the right to purchase the station for five years. And the press service of the energy holding is reluctant to comment on this topic. "RAO is proud that it managed to interest almost all of the largest energy companies in the world," says a RAO employee. "But we understand that before the start of the competition, potential candidates may refuse to participate in it."

Trust Bank analyst Andrey Zubkov believes that E.ON's refusal to participate in the North-West Thermal Power Plant is unexpected, since the German company knows the plant "like no other of the contenders, and has been working in Russia more than anyone else." And Sergey Suverov from Zenit Bank believes that E.ON has not found a Russian partner who could agree on gas supplies to the plant at regulated prices. "If gas for the plant has to be purchased at free prices, this will have a strong impact on its profitability," the analyst states. "And relations between E.ON and Gazprom have noticeably deteriorated recently."

The contenders are leaving