A major German state-owned energy supplier is profiting from Russian natural gas, as opposed to its German customers, who are not.
Bloomberg reports that the company Securing Energy for Europe GmbH (SEFE) has resumed shipping Russian liquid natural gas, delivering to India.
The company plans to receive an LNG shipment from the Yamal liquefaction plant in Siberia on October 1st. A SEFE ship, the Amur River, will pick up the cargo in Zeebrugge, Belgium, and then transport it to India.
SEFE is a major holding company with entities operating in countries throughout Europe, Asia, and North America. Until 2022, it was a subsidiary of the Russian company Gazprom. The German federal energy regulator—the Bundesnetzagentur—took control of it in 2022 in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It was then bailed out by the German government with €10 billion. Russia also imposed sanctions on it, which were lifted on Russian LNG in June.
The EU has not imposed sanctions on Russian natural gas, though pipeline supplies have been cut off and Germany has pledged to dismiss the Russian fossil fuel from consideration, encouraging companies not to trade in Russian natural gas.
A SEFE spokesman told Bloomberg in an email that
German ports are not involved in this process, nor are European or German gas networks. These delivery volumes therefore do not reach the German market, industry or consumers in Germany.
The German company has long-term contracts for deliveries from Yamal LNG and separate long-term contracts to supply natural gas to GAIL Ltd. in India.
The company’s move has been roundly criticised.
“This contradicts almost everything that the federal government has said on the matter in the past. It appears that economic ties with Russia are not as easy to sever as politicians would like,” Christian Leye, spokesperson for the Left Party’s economic policy faction in the Bundestag, commented to Bloomberg.
In June of this year, SEFE also signed a 20-year contract to buy 2.25 million tonnes of LNG a year from the American company Venture Global LNG, which has developed export terminals along the Gulf of Mexico.
