Nord Stream AG

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Nord Stream AG

logo
legal form Corporation
founding December 2, 2005
Seat Zug , Switzerland
management Alexey Zagorovskiy, managing director

Gerhard Schröder , Chairman of the Shareholders' Committee

Number of employees approx. 150 (2012)
Website www.nord-stream.com

Old logo

The Nord Stream AG operates the pipeline Nord Stream I for the transport of natural gas from Russia through the Baltic Sea to Germany .

The separate company Nord Stream 2 AG is responsible for the second Nord Stream II gas pipeline, which runs largely in parallel .

history

The company was registered in Zug on December 2, 2005 as a stock corporation under Swiss law under the name NEGP Company in the Swiss commercial register. It was renamed Nord Stream AG in September 2006 . The choice of the new name was based on the designations of other important undersea natural gas pipelines such as the Blue Stream through the Black Sea to Turkey and the Greenstream in the Mediterranean .

owner

The leading Russian natural gas company Gazprom holds a 51% majority stake. The Wintershall , a subsidiary of BASF , and E.ON Ruhrgas participated with 24.5% each.

On November 6, 2007, it was announced that the Dutch Gasunie is investing 9% in the Baltic Sea pipeline. Gasunie will receive half of these shares in the joint venture from E.ON Ruhrgas and the BASF subsidiary Wintershall, whose share will thus fall from 24.5% to 20%. The Russian Gazprom remains the majority shareholder with 51%. Wintershall and E.ON Ruhrgas currently hold 15.5% each, and Gasunie and the French GDF Suez each hold 9% of the shares.

Business activity

The company's goal is the planning, construction and operation of the Nord Stream Baltic Sea pipeline . After the construction of two tubes was completed in 2012, the number of employees was significantly reduced, so that at the end of 2014 only around 50 people were employed. The possible construction of two more tubes is planned.

Corporate governance

The corporate management consists of the shareholders' committee and the management.

The shareholders' committee has tasks that are comparable to those of the supervisory board of a stock corporation under German law. In particular, it defines the company's business policy guidelines and appoints the managing director.

The eight-member Shareholders' Committee is chaired by former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder as one of four Gazprom representatives . The other Gazprom representatives in the Shareholders' Committee are Gazprom CEO Alexei Miller , the General Director of Gazprom's gas export subsidiary, Gazpromexport , Alexander Medvedev , and Vlada Russakova. E.ON Ruhrgas and Wintershall each send two members to the Shareholders' Committee.

The managing director of Nord Stream AG was initially Matthias Warnig , a close confidante of Putin, who had previously worked for Dresdner Bank from 1990 , for which he set up a representative office in Saint Petersburg from 1991. Alexey Zagorovskiy has been the managing director since 2016.

Interests and criticism of the Nord Stream

The pipeline construction not only affects the interests of the companies involved, the natural gas supplier country Russia and the recipient country Germany as well as possible other recipient countries. This also affects the interests of states that are circumvented by transport through the Baltic Sea as transit states on the mainland ( Belarus , Poland , Ukraine ). Ultimately, the construction, which stretched through almost the entire Baltic Sea, also affected the other bordering states of the Baltic Sea, in particular due to its ecological effects.

Interests of Germany and the European Union

Thanks to this pipeline, Germany got a direct connection to Russian gas reserves. The gas does not have to pass through other countries such as Belarus, Poland and Ukraine. Possible political or economic disputes between Russia and the transit countries cannot endanger the security of deliveries to Germany.

Critics complain that Germany's natural gas supply is becoming even more dependent on the previous main supplier, Russia. The increasing dependency not only carries the risk of price increases by Russia, but also makes Germany politically open to blackmail.

The European Union supports the construction of the Nord Stream. It regards the line as a priority energy project of pan-European interest and classified it as a so-called TEN project in 2000 and 2006 (TEN: Trans-European Network).

Interests of Russia

Russia is opening up another transport route for its natural gas exports to Western Europe without passing through third countries. This eliminates the risk that transit countries will illegally not or only partially forward Russian deliveries and consume them themselves.

At the same time, Russia will in future be able to use gas supplies to Central and Eastern Europe more easily as a political and economic leverage. In the future, Russia will be able to cut off Central and Eastern European countries from its gas supply without any negative effects on Western European customers, provided that the Western European states can receive replacement deliveries through the Nord Stream pipeline. So far, however, when Russia's supply is interrupted - for example in the gas dispute between Russia and Ukraine - Western European buyer countries have also been affected.

The position of Russia in negotiations with the transit states on the transit fees and the prices of the quantities of gas they purchase has been strengthened by the construction of the Nord Stream. However, it must be taken into account that the capacity of the Nord Stream pipeline will initially only be 27.5 billion cubic meters and when it is completed it will be around 55 billion cubic meters. Natural gas deliveries through the existing pipelines through Ukraine (capacity according to information from the German Institute for Economic Research: around 140 billion cubic meters) and through Belarus and Poland ( natural gas pipeline from Yamal to Europe with a capacity of around 33 billion cubic meters) could at best be partially shifted to the Nord Stream become.

Criticism of the Nord Stream

The Nord Stream pipeline has been criticized in particular by countries through which Russian natural gas exports to Western Europe have so far been directed (for example Poland). They fear a worsening of their negotiating positions in negotiating the conditions for the delivery of Russian natural gas to their countries and the transit fees, since Western Europe is directly connected to Russia through the Nord Stream and Russia will in future be able to more easily reduce deliveries to the transit countries without also having to To reduce deliveries to Western Europe.

In Poland in particular, the project was sharply criticized for political reasons, since participation in important issues, especially in cases of German-Russian cooperation, and fear of Russian neo-imperialism have been important motives in Polish security policy since the fall of the Wall. The circumvention of the East Central European states without their consent was therefore compared by the then Defense Minister Radosław Sikorski with the Hitler-Stalin Pact , the pipeline was described as geopolitically "directed against Poland".

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Website of the society ( Memento of the original from November 26, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed November 25, 2016 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.nord-stream.com
  2. ↑ Official Homepage - Imprint , last accessed on March 21, 2014
  3. ↑ Official homepage - corporate structure , last accessed on November 25, 2016
  4. ↑ Nord Stream is cutting jobs. In: Der Tagesspiegel. January 22, 2014, accessed May 2, 2014 .
  5. ↑ NordStream wants more tubes for the Baltic Sea pipeline. In: The world. April 8, 2013, accessed May 2, 2014 .
  6. ↑ Thomas Winter: Security and Foreign Policy Role. On the security policy cultures and Ukraine policy of Poland and the Czech Republic, Trier 2013, [1]
  7. ↑ Hans Michael Kloth: Indirect Hitler comparison: Polish minister rumbles against Schröder and Merkel. In: Spiegel Online. April 30, 2006, accessed July 24, 2014 .