Moscow (Reuters) – A court in Russia has ordered the confiscation of 13 containers for liquid helium from the gas group Linde in the dispute over a major order from Gazprom.
The Arbitration Court for Saint Petersburg and the Leningrad Region said on Friday that it would place the containers worth 1.3 billion rubles (13 million euros) under the control of Gazprom subsidiary RusKhimAlyans. The joint venture, in which Gazprom holds 50 percent, wants to build a large natural gas complex at the Baltic Sea port of Ust-Luga and awarded the contract to build the plant to Linde in 2021. However, the American-German company stopped work in May 2022 citing the EU sanctions against Russia.
At the beginning of the year, at the request of RusKhimAlyans, the arbitration court had already frozen Linde’s assets worth the equivalent of almost 500 million euros. The gas group, whose plant engineering division is based in Munich, claims that the export of liquefied natural gas (LNG) from Russia is banned under EU sanctions. The client, on the other hand, is of the opinion that although the sanction prohibits the delivery of equipment for the LNG plant, another part of the complex, a gas processing plant, is not affected.
At that time, RusKhimAlyans had announced that it would appeal to an arbitration court in Hong Kong to claim 972 million euros in down payments and damages of 7.6 billion rubles (82 million euros). In October, Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank prevailed in a London court to prevent RusKhimAlyans from suing them over the failed project in Russia.
(Report by Oksana Kobzeva; Written by Alexander Hübner; edited by Sabine Wollrab. If you have any questions, please contact our editorial team at [email protected] (for politics and the economy) or [email protected] (for companies and markets).)