Azerbaijani state oil company SOCAR is not going to abandon the purchase of a share in the Greek gas operator DESFA, President of SOCAR Rovnag Abdullayev said.
“We won the tender and we’re not going to abandon the deal [with DESFA]”, Abdullayev said. “We don’t talk about appealing to a court, but we will defend our interests till the end. The originally negotiated rules have been violated. We are now waiting for justification from the government of Greece. Under the new rules, DESFA’s value should be twice cheaper, so we are in talks with the Greek government”.
SOCAR won a tender in 2013 on the purchase of a 66% stake in DESFA for 400 million euros.
Earlier, Azerbaijan’s Energy Minister Natig Aliyev said that the deal on SOCAR’s purchasing the 66% share in Greece’s DESFA would be completed after Italy’s Snam purchased 17% of that share.
Snam, just like SOCAR, was in talks with the Greek government regarding the situation, Abdullayev said.
In July, Greek Minister of Environment, Energy and Climate Change Panos Skourletis accused the European Commission of delaying the deal on selling a share in Greece’s DESFA to SOCAR. Skourletis said that a number of conditions, set by the European Commission, greatly slowed the privatization process of the gas operator.
In particular, the company will become a passive shareholder, not entitled to vote in the management of the company, as a result of decreasing SOCAR’s share in DESFA to 49%.
Greek MPs stressed that the problems with the privatization of DESFA might deprive the country’s economy of SOCAR’s huge capital injections. (Trend/Business World Magazine)