Ukraine Confiscates Gazprom Assets

Ukraine has confiscated 100 million Grivnas ($3.81 million) in the execution of a fine imposed by the Antimonopoly Committee on the Russian company Gazprom. The Minister of Justice of Ukraine, Pavel Petrenko, announced the news last week. “Gazprom has nothing to say,” he said. “Despite the actual disruption of relations between countries, dependence on Ukrainian transit is still too great.”

“The Ministry of Justice is charging Gazprom on a decision of the Ukrainian court on a fine in favor of the budget at the initiative of the Antimonopoly Committee. We have already recovered some of the funds - everything that Gazprom had on the territory of Ukraine has been described, confiscated and recovered in the state budget. This is more than 100 million Grivnas in the Ukrainian budget,” the Minister said.

Petrenko said he also plans to appeal to other countries to arrest the funds of Gazprom.

“There is an appropriate instruction from Prime Minister Vladimir Groisman, and we now have good prospects and good achievements in implementing these decisions not only in Ukraine, but in other countries with which Ukraine has relevant agreements,” Minister Petrenko said.

In addition, according to the minister, measures are being developed to recover money from the Russian monopolist for the shortage of agreed volumes of gas for transit in accordance with the decision of the Stockholm Arbitration.

Gazprom has nothing to answer in this confiscation as Russia's dependence on transit through Ukraine is too great. By 2019, the Nord Stream-2 gas pipeline is scheduled to be commissioned. According to Kommersant, by that time the ground infrastructure in the EU will not be ready. To be more precise, the Eugal gas pipeline (European Gas Pipeline), an analog of the Opal line ((Ostsee-Pipeline-Anbindungsleitung, a natural gas pipeline in Germany), which should become a continuation of the Nord Stream-2 in Germany, will be built only by the end of 2020.

In 2017, despite the disruption of relations between the countries due to Crimea and Donbass, the Russian company pumped through the territory of Ukraine a record volume of 93 billion cubic meters of gas.

Dimitri Dolaberidze