What was once Gazprom’s largest foreign customer, the German Uniper Group, has to be nationalized. The German state agrees with Uniper and the largest shareholder, Fortum from Finland, to participate and will hold 99 percent. The state will get 93 percent through a capital increase of eight billion euros, and it will pay 480 million euros for another six percent to Fortum.
According to experts, Uniper had obtained more than half of its natural gas volume from Russia. Due to the supply cuts in Russia and the gas transport through the Baltic Sea pipeline Nord Stream 1, which has been stopped for weeks, Uniper has come under extreme pressure.
The supplier has to buy the missing quantities on the expensive spot market in order to fulfill the contracts with its customers. The group put the daily losses at times over 100 million euros.
Uniper was also the financial partner of the failed Nord Stream 2 Baltic Sea gas pipeline.
Uniper emerged from the former power plant division and trading business of the energy group E.ON, which it spun off in 2016. The name is an artificial term made up of “unique” and “performance”. The idea for this came from an employee.
The group, headquartered in Düsseldorf, employs 11,500 people in more than 40 countries, around 5,000 of them in Germany. The main markets are Germany, Great Britain, Sweden and – until the war in Ukraine – Russia. Uniper has enough power plants to generate as much electricity as 33 nuclear power plants and operates gas storage facilities in Germany, Austria and the UK.
Economics Minister Robert Habeck also promised the other major gas importers in Germany support if necessary. “As we have shown, the state will do everything necessary to keep the companies stable on the market. That applies to Uniper. That applies to the other large, systemically important companies in Germany.”
Source: Nachrichten
