| Schroeder is accused of providing state guarantees for a failed loan to Gazprom The name of the former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and his new place of work in the North European Gas Pipeline Company controlled by the Russian Gazprom (among its shareholders are also the German E.ON and BASF), which will build the underwater part of the North European Gas Pipeline, was connected another scandal. We are talking about the amount of 900 million euros that last fall - less than a month before the defeat of the “red-green” Schröder government in the early parliamentary elections - were offered to Gazprom as a loan guaranteed by the German budget. Specifically, this money was intended to finance the construction of the NEGP section from the Yuzhno-Russkoye field in Siberia to St. Petersburg. However, Gazprom announced last Friday that it had refused the offer from Creditanstalt AG and Deutsche Bank to finance the construction of the onshore part of the NEGP and would finance this work independently, Interfax reports. However, the concern confirmed the very fact of such a proposal. However, the German state bank KfW told German media that the work on providing the loan has not been completed and that “nothing has been decided yet.”
The former German Chancellor was elected head of the supervisory board of the North European Gas Pipeline last week in Moscow. Over the months that have passed since Schröder's resignation, many complaints have been made against him among senior politicians and representatives of the business elite in connection with his personal participation in the NEG project, one of the organizers and inspirers of which he himself was. But the biggest scandal seems to have broken out right now.
As the Munich daily Suddeutsche Zeitung reported over the weekend, the government interdepartmental committee for the provision of loan guarantees officially confirmed the cabinet's consent to the loan to Gazprom on October 24 last year. After which the relevant documents were sent to the budget committee of the Bundestag. However, this decision was not made public in the fall. Now, when the budget layout for the next year has begun in Germany, the Bundestag decided to make public the documents on the loan “for private construction”, which is what politicians see as the NEGP construction project.
The accompanying documents say, Suddeutsche Zeitung writes, that the cost of building a gas pipeline from the Yuzhno-Russkoye field to St. Petersburg is estimated at $4-5 billion. German banks are ready to provide a loan to Gazprom to finance at least a fifth of the construction. If Gazprom is unable to repay this loan from private banks, then this amount plus accrued bank interest will be returned to the bankers from the German state budget. Typically, the government only takes on political risks in the projects it supports. In this case, financial obligations were also taken upon ourselves. As justification for such generosity, representatives of the previous government pointed out that distinguishing between both types of risks in the case of a new gas pipeline “is difficult, since Gazprom is actually a state-owned enterprise.”
In their first comments, German budget parliamentarians called such a financing scheme “unusual,” to say the least. After all, in this case we are talking about an “untied loan” - the guarantees are received not by a German company exporting, but by a foreign one. The federal government shells out for such guarantees “relatively rarely” - most often when it comes to issues of energy supply in Germany. In this case, the former government interdepartmental committee on guarantees recognized the NEGP project as “worthy of energy political support.”
But if necessary, the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel and, of course, German taxpayers will now have to bear responsibility for financial risks. For them, the prospect of providing possible material assistance to the Russian Gazprom, it must be assumed, will not cause any special positive emotions. In addition, opponents of Schröder’s policies intend to promote the scandal to the fullest. By the way, last Friday in Hamburg a court hearing began on Schröder’s lawsuit against the head of the parliamentary opposition, Guido Westerwelle, who heads the Free Democratic Party - as you know, Westerwelle several weeks ago publicly accused Schröder of “being the Federal Chancellor of one company.” gave the order, and a few weeks after surrendering his government powers, he himself entered the service of this company.” Yuri Shpakov, Berlin |
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