Gazprom fails to bid for Greek gas company DEPA

The official representative of Gazprom, Sergei Kupriyanov, says that the Russian gas giant has still not filed a formal application for the privatization of the Greek gas company DEPA. According to him, the Russian company has not received sufficient assurances that the financial situation of the Greek company will not worsen by the time of completion of the transaction.
According to Sergei Kupriyanov, "all the procedures for the approval and registration of the purchase of DEPA after the results of the tender are announced may take about a year.  The company already has serious problems with non-payment by customers; it will undergo restructuring for allocating the unit DESFA (a DEPA Holding specialising in the wholesale supply of natural gas to major customers, and its subsidiary DESFA has a national gas supply network). The tenderers are not guaranteed a non-deterioration of the regime of state regulation of DEPA. All this poses significant risks affecting the value of the company, while the price of the transaction is proposed to be fixed right now, without taking into account these factors."

With regard to all these circumstances, it was decided not to file an application for DEPA, Kupriyanov concluded.

It should be noted that the Russian and Greek sides had been conducting long and difficult negotiations of a confidential character. In recent months, the head of "Gazprom", Alexey Miller, has visited Athens three times for negotiations on the privatization of DEPA.

As “Vestnik Kavkaza” previously reported, among the participants of the competition were the Russian companies"Gazprom" and "Negusneft" from the group "Synthesis", two Greek consortiums and the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan SOCAR.

The winners of the bid for the Greek gas company are to be declared in Athens today.