Russia warns of retaliation on EU energy plan
Photo Dmitry Medvedev, Chairman of Gazprom
(MOSCOW) - Russia sees EU plans to limit foreign investment in its energy sector as violating free market principles and will respond if the measures are enacted, a top Russian official warned Friday.
"It has unfortunately become fashionable among various states to take decisions limiting foreign investment" in the energy sector, First Deputy Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev was quoted as saying by Russian news agencies.
"Such processes are taking place in united Europe. We think this is contradictory firstly to the spirit of globalisation and, secondly, to the principle of the open market," the agencies quoted Medvedev as saying.
Medvedev, a top contender to succeed President Vladimir Putin in elections next March who is also chairman of the state-run energy giant Gazprom, said Russian "will be obliged to react" if the EU plans are adopted.
"There could be various responses, there could be an asymmetrical response," he said, without elaborating.
The measures Medvedev was referring to were contained in sweeping EU plans to shake up the energy sector, including a call for major gas and electricity suppliers in the bloc to divest themselves of their pipelines and power grids.
To avoid non-EU firms snapping up energy transport networks spun off in Europe, the EU Commission proposed that foreign groups would have to prove that they did not own gas supply or power generating activities.
"We need to place tough conditions on ownership of assets by non-European companies to make sure that we all play by the same rules," EU Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso said earlier this month.
The restrictions on foreign companies are widely seen as designed to keep companies such as state-owned Russian energy giant Gazprom and Algerian state oil and gas group Sonatrach from gaining control of gas taps for European consumers.
Gazprom chief executive Alexei Miller said Friday that the group was studying the EU plans closely.
"The draft for such decisions appeared last week. These documents are now with Gazprom. We are analyzing them and will share our point of view on them in the very near future," Miller said.
Russian media earlier this month said that the EU plans to overhaul the bloc's energy sector would create an "energy iron curtain" that would effectively shut out foreign companies.
The plans had put Gazprom in "open confrontation" with the 27-nation bloc, the liberal daily Gazeta commented on September 20.
The paper said the EU plans could wreck "Gazprom's ambitions to reach the European consumer and force it to completely reassess its strategy for its external economic development."
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