Russia pledges to build gas pipeline through Serbia by 2015 for 400 million euros
Posted by seumasach on December 7, 2008
Today’s Zaman
7th December, 2008
| Russia on Friday pledged to complete a strategic gas pipeline through Serbia by 2015 — despite the global financial crisis — paving the way for its immediate purchase of Serbia’s state energy monopoly.The head of Russia’s oil arm of Gazprom, Alexei Miller, said in Belgrade that the Russian energy giant is to buy a 51 percent stake in Serbia’s Naftna Industrija Srbije (NIS) for an estimated 400 million euros, with the deal expected to be signed by the end of this month. Serbia had said it would only sell the company if Russia committed to building the pipeline. “An agreement was reached today to sign” the package deal to purchase NIS and to build the natural gas pipeline through Serbia, Miller said after his talks with Serbian President Boris Tadic.
The $13 billion pipeline to be laid under the Black Sea would carry Russian natural gas to Bulgaria and Serbia before branching out to points in Western Europe.
Some Serbian officials had worried that the Russian plans could be postponed or canceled amid the global financial crisis, and had demanded guarantees that the pipeline would be built. Serbian government officials had said NIS must not be sold to Russia until it starts building the pipeline. Miller said the pipeline would be completed by December 2015 at the latest, but maybe even earlier, towards the end of 2013.
Russia has offered about 400 million euros for a controlling share in NIS, and another 500 million euros to modernize the company. But Serbian Economy Minister Mladjan Dinkic, who has opposed the deal all along, has said in the past such an offer is only about one-fifth the company’s market value.
Dinkic and other pro-Western ministers in the government fear that Russia’s takeover of the country’s energy sector would dramatically increase Moscow’s political influence in the Balkan country.
The Gazprom pipeline would undercut an alternative project — the Nabucco pipeline planned for carrying natural gas westward from the Caucasus. That project is backed by the United States and the European Union as a way to ease Europe’s energy reliance on Russia.
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