A Gazprom PJSC venture has racked up 110 billion rubles ($1.2 billion) in legal claims after filing two more lawsuits against European banks that backed a key natural gas project caught up in sanctions against Russia.
(Bloomberg) — A Gazprom PJSC venture has racked up 110 billion rubles ($1.2 billion) in legal claims after filing two more lawsuits against European banks that backed a key natural gas project caught up in sanctions against Russia.
RusKhimAlians, a joint enterprise between Gazprom and Rusgazdobycha, is seeking 28.2 billion rubles from BayernLB and 5.35 billion rubles from Landesbank Baden-Wurttemberg, according to filings made Aug. 30 to the Arbitration Court of the St. Petersburg and Leningrad region.
The two German banks were among the guarantors for the engineering, procurement and construction contract signed in 2021 with Germany’s Linde Plc and Turkey’s Renaissance Heavy Industries for a complex to produce liquefied natural gas and other products in Ust-Luga on the Baltic Sea, according to Interfax. Last year, Linde suspended work under the contract amid European sanctions imposed on Russia over its war in Ukraine.
The latest lawsuits follow one filed earlier this month against the German arm of UniCredit SpA, and two in July against Deutsche Bank AG and Commerzbank AG. Last year, RusKhimAlians filed a claim against Linde in the Arbitration Court of St. Petersburg and Leningrad, which froze 35 billion rubles of Linde’s assets in Russia as a preventive measure requested by the plaintiff.
RusKhimAlians claims that while European restrictions against Russia prohibit supplying equipment to liquefy natural gas, they don’t refer to the equipment required for a gas processing plant, according to Russian media reports.
Production at the Ust-Luga complex may be delayed by about two years as RusKhimAlians seeks alternative suppliers of equipment and technology, said Alexander Drozdenko, the governor of Russia’s Leningrad region where the facility will be built, according to Interfax. Gazprom had planned to launch the facility’s first LNG train this year.
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