Stockholm court rejects Lithuania’s Gazprom claim

A four-year-long dispute between Lithuania and Russia’s gas giant Gazprom has ended with the court ruling against the Baltic country, which filed a €1.5bn ($1.7bn) claim over gas pricing.

The Arbitration Institute of the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce (SCC) “rejected all claims made by Lithuania with respect to the terms of purchasing Russian natural gas, including the 1.5 billion euro claim against Gazprom,” the Russian gas giant said in a statement.

According to Gazprom, in its ruling, the SCC rejected all of Lithuania’s allegations of “unfair prices” for gas supplied by Gazprom in the period from 2006 through 2015 to Lietuvos Dujos, the national utility in which Gazprom had a 34 percent stake.

Earlier, rulings in favor of Gazprom on other disputes between the company and Lithuania were made by the SCC, a number of Lithuanian courts, and the European Court of Justice, Gazprom said in the statement.

Lithuanian energy minister Rokas Masiulis said the arbitration ended a “long and difficult fight” with Gazprom.

“Conclusions confirmed that we were going the right way, Gazprom had a conflict of interest, which disappeared with the implementation of the EU third energy package,” Masiulis said in a statement.

“After all, we started legal proceedings against Gazprom and built a liquefied natural gas terminal. As a result, Gazprom has been forced to reduce gas prices and users saved more than 100 million euros per year,” he said.

Lithuania started importing LNG in December 2014 in order to reduce its dependence on Russian pipeline gas supplies.

The Baltic country imports the chilled fuel via the Independence FSRU, located in the port of Klaipeda, under a 10-year contract it has with Norway’s Statoil.

LNG World News Staff