Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Germany has seized control of Gazprom Germania

businessinsider.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 424 posts

Re: Germany has seized control of Gazprom Germania

#201

Post by mensetmanusman »

sonicggg wrote: post #40

How many years has Merkel remained in power? This awkward situation is all her doing, but still nobody will mention her name. How can one country willingly put its entire energy sector in the hands of a terrorist state, which has been showing signs since 1999 when bombing its own citizens.

Yeah, it is surreal to see many of the predictions from the US state department and the DOD come true. As an American who lived in Germany, I wish the Germans would have been correct, but I am happy to see our institutions have a few smart people remaining… sigh

Re: Germany has seized control of Gazprom Germania

#202

Post by pelasaco »

The TL;DR is:

"Germany's economy minister announced the seizure in a statement on Monday. The move came after the ministry of economic affairs learned that Gazprom Germania had been acquired by JSC Palmary and Gazprom export business services LLC — but it wasn't clear who the owners behind the two companies were, per the statement."

Re: Germany has seized control of Gazprom Germania

#203

Post by idleproc »

lordnacho wrote: post #82
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Eventually the quality will deteriorate What quality? Even in Austria, at some really busy McD's I've been to like the train station or airport, their finished burgers looked nothing like the ones in the menu. Often they had components like the cheese, lettuce and sauces missing and I got just a dry paddy between two barren pieces of bread as a burger lol. It was uneatable so I had to throw it away and buy a sandwic…

> looked nothing like the ones in the pictures This is surely too high a standard! Did Coke ever give you the satisfaction of the people in the Christmas adverts? Did you get girls after you bought Lynx? Did you score more goals with those Predators?

Lynx kept the defenders away so I scored more goals, and the Predators made me look like Beckham...

Re: Germany has seized control of Gazprom Germania

#204

Post by zivkovicp »

op00to wrote: post #190
tedivm wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you back that up with a source? It's the opposite of what basically everyone has been saying and I can't find anything that even hints that there isn't a fixed settlement currency in their contracts. Russia has been trying to push this issue for weeks, while Germany and others are refusing to pay in anything but euros.

[flagged]

No post body was provided.

Re: Germany has seized control of Gazprom Germania

#205

Post by zekrioca »

ectopod wrote: post #143
diskapital wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Gazprom attenpted to change owners and default the company. Is that illegal? I wonder about rule of law. We talk about this as sacrosanct here in the "West". It is funny that when push comes to shove (in my perception at least), we're quick to break the rules to get the outcome we want. When say a 3rd world country does something like this in response to a "Western" multinational's actions (perhaps a controversial…

There are additional rules for critical national infrastructure. The gas company didn't follow them and this gave the government the legal right to seize the business.

Honest question: Then why did they (Germany) allow Gazprom to own critical infra. in the first place?

Re: Germany has seized control of Gazprom Germania

#206

Post by gumby »

mkoryak wrote: post #157
cf141q5325 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read a great reader comment on the topic (also in German so try DeepL) https://blog.fefe.de/?ts=9cb54d35 Its a political push and pull about who defaults on the existing contracts on gas import, seeing as Russia wants to be payed in ruble now, while Germany would prefer the payments to be stuck on a EU bank account as a form of reparation payments to the Ukraine. To prevent this outcome, Russia in effect might be l…

I am curious, why is this being downvoted?

Because ultimately it makes a strong assertion that the German government fucked up without supporting it.

There’s nothing wrong with saying the government fucked up (though I don’t think it did). But the non sequitur opinion doesn’t add to the discussion.

Re: Germany has seized control of Gazprom Germania

#207

Post by fuoqi »

mschuster91 wrote: post #107
nbadg wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To expand on this: much of the distribution infrastructure within Germany is owned by Gazprom. For example, there's a very large natural gas storage capacity within Germany, but a significant portion of that is owned by, you guessed it, Gazprom. There's broad consensus that, if all of the storage infrastructure were topped up, Germany would be able to make it through _next_ winter reasonably well, even if Russia stop…

> It's also worth pointing out that there's been some evidence suggesting that, in the weeks and months leading up to the Russian invasion of the Ukraine, the "fill level" of the Russian-owned storage infrastructure within Germany was decreased, which would both be a way for Russia to attempt to leverage gas delivery against sanctions (in other words, blackmail), as well as yet another strong indication that the inva…

>Gazprom still kept their long-term contracts but unlike all the prior times did not supply much on the spot market - which led to the well observed price hikes and utilities going bankrupt or out of business because their "old" strategy of simply buying on the spot market didn't work out.

What do you expect to happen when long-term contracts get tied to spot prices? Why the hell would Gazprom willingly lower the spot prices when bulk of its sales will suffer from it?

Re: Germany has seized control of Gazprom Germania

#208

Post by ZeroGravitas »

pilsetnieks wrote: post #96
archerx wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes I wonder if the Greens are actually funded by petrol companies because everything they do seems to benefit them in the end. In Switzerland the Greens are trying to be as dumb as the German ones.

Not just some petrol companies, by Gazprom itself: https://www.transparency.org/en/press/germany-state-governme...

That's not a green group, it's just a front for Gazprom.

Just like the fake "Whale conservation" group fighting wind power off Nantucket is a front.

If you want to criticize something as large as the Environmental movement, and you can't even find one real example to cite then maybe that means something.

If you can't criticize them, don't bring up people that are larping as them for their own ends.

Re: Germany has seized control of Gazprom Germania

#209

Post by tazjin »

tedivm wrote: post #176
tazjin wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I've read, the contracts between Gazprom Germany and Gazprom Export (on the Russian side) do not have a fixed settlement currency. > This would have allowed them to require payments in Rubles instead of Euros "allowed" is a funny word - this situation is way past a point where cross-border contracts on either side hold any legal value. How are you going to hold anyone accountable for breach of contract?

Can you back that up with a source? It's the opposite of what basically everyone has been saying and I can't find anything that even hints that there isn't a fixed settlement currency in their contracts. Russia has been trying to push this issue for weeks, while Germany and others are refusing to pay in anything but euros.

So most of this stuff is not public, so there is no single source to point you to, but from what people have puzzled together on various forums the structure is approximately this (corrections welcome):

ПАО Gazprom (the _actual_ Gazprom; ПАО is a Russian joint-stock company) owns another Russian company (Gazprom Export OOO; OOO is a Russian LLC), which in turn owned Gazprom Germania GmbH (GmbH is a German LLC).

ПАО Gazprom sold gas to Gazprom Export, which in turn sold gas to Gazprom Germania, which in turn sells the gas to the actual European companies.

The change in Russian law which switches the currency to rubles affects the transactions between Gazprom Export OOO and Gazprom Germania GmbH (which were previously both owned by Russia), which made the settlement an "internal" affair of Gazprom for German exports.

(This stuff is fairly well established and you can look at the German & Russian company registers, the legal text of the Russian decree etc. for more detailed information. The next part is less well understood)

Previously this settlement took place through Gazprom Germania sending money from its German account(s) to an account of held in Gazprombank Luxembourg (GPB International S.A., a Luxembourgian Public Limited Company). This account may be a correspondence account for a Gazprombank Russia account owned by Gazprom Export, it's unclear. These funds can be frozen by the EU (and I think are, leading to the Russian claim that they're currently supplying some gas for "free").

With the law change in Russia, this transfer must now happen to a new type of currency account established by Gazprombank Russia (though it's unclear / not publicly known how those are backed, e.g. whether it's also through correspondent accounts at GBP International S.A.) where it is automatically sold and converted into rubles, which are then transferred to Gazprom Export in Russia.

Now an important bit that most people don't seem to get is that none of this affects pricing, it's akin to a change in payment method. The supply contracts between e.g. the European gas purchasers and Gazprom Germania have complicated pricing schemes which are likely tied to one or more currencies (EUR & USD) and Russia is sticking to those pricing agremeents - but insisting on changing how the settlement happens.

What is kind of unclear at the moment is what Gazprom stands to gain from the sale (and subsequent (attempted?) liquidation of Gazprom Germania). There are a handful of theories about this, but in practice we probably won't know for a while.

Re: Germany has seized control of Gazprom Germania

#210

Post by saiya-jin »

rgmarker wrote: post #121
martimarkov wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you forget that Ukraine has the right of agency and has the right to choose to join a defensive union. I'm also finding it hard to get any concrete examples of offensive actions by NATO. So far every single one seems to be okay with Russia (given they didn't veto it in the UN security council).

Suppose the following reversed situation: - There is still a Warsaw Pact. - An Orange Revolution happens in Canada in 2014, backed by KGB neocon equivalents of Nuland/Graham. - A Russia friendly regime is installed in Canada in 2014. - Canada has regions with large U.S. populations. - Canada keeps pushing for Warsaw Pact membership. - At a security conference in Munich in 2022, Canada's Russia friendly prime minister…

You over-simplify things quite a bit. Just because people in given country want freedom and not have as rulers constant puppets of russia doesn't mean they became US lapdogs. Its russia's fault that they globally represent oppression, corruption, incompetence, war crimes and now even genocide of their closest neighbors. Nobody normal would want to align with that voluntarily, only other bullies and murderers (which is exactly whats happening if you look at ie UN voting re Ukraine).

Don't forget that Ukraine during ruling of all those russian puppets became country so desperately poor that even such a place like russia was rich by comparison. I don't find it strange at all that people just wanted to get rid of this constant negative drag on their very existence.

Post reply on HN