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RUSSIA

Power firm ‘spent €200m on Russian favours’

A lobbyist has accused German electricity company EnBW of systematically spending €200 million on sham contracts – distributing the money to churches, chess schools and other “politically useful causes” in Russia.

Power firm 'spent €200m on Russian favours'
Photo: DPA

Andrey Bykov, a lobbyist who supposedly had access to Russian President Vladimir Putin and crucial Russian energy firms Gazprom and Rosneft, told the Handelsblatt business newspaper he had been involved in channelling the EnBW money to help its gas trade ambitions in Russia.

He even named three EnBW chairmen as being responsible for the handouts. “A quarter of the sum was paid out during the time of [Gerhard] Goll, three quarters in the time of [Utz] Claassen and [Hans-Peter] Villis,” he told Tuesday’s paper.

He admitted he pocketed half of the €200 million himself, but gave the rest to support 84 churches, 60 chess schools, 30 memorials, one opera and three orchestras, as well as kindergartens and hospitals. He said the donations “fostered the political landscape.”

The lobby donations were hidden from EnBW’s majority owner, Electricité de France, and were declared instead as nuclear technology lobby work, he admitted.

The Handelsblatt said EnBW and Bykov are currently in a legal fight over where the money went.

The paper said that the French firm first began to doubt that the money was being spent as claimed in 2004, when it emerged that the expense was to “create an advantageous climate in the gas area,” according to Bykov.

“After the German exit from nuclear power in 2000, EnBW was under enormous pressure. The company urgently needed an alternative source of energy,” he told the paper. Gas was the magic word, he said.

Claassen, in charge of EnBW from 2003 until 2007, told the paper he could not remember anything about millions of euros given to churches and memorials – and said he had not followed such a strategy on gas.

His predecessor Goll, who ran the firm from 1997 until 2003, said there were no sham contracts, but the paper said he certainly was pursuing a gas strategy.

Villis said EnBW had always assumed that Bykov had been using the millions of euros “for contractually agreed purposes” – in other words, buying up fuel.

The Local/hc

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RUSSIA

Russia announces no New Year’s greetings for France, US, Germany

US President Joe Biden, France's Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz will not be receiving New Year's greetings from Russian leader Vladimir Putin, the Kremlin said on Friday.

Russia announces no New Year's greetings for France, US, Germany

As the world gears up to ring in the New Year this weekend, Putin sent congratulatory messages to the leaders of Kremlin-friendly countries including Turkey, Syria, Venezuela and China.

But Putin will not wish a happy New Year to the leaders of the United States, France and Germany, countries that have piled unprecedented sanctions on Moscow over Putin’s assault on Ukraine.

“We currently have no contact with them,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.

“And the president will not congratulate them given the unfriendly actions that they are taking on a continuous basis,” he added.

Putin shocked the world by sending troops to pro-Western Ukraine on February 24.

While Kyiv’s Western allies refused to send troops to Ukraine, they have been supplying the ex-Soviet country with weapons in a show of support that has seen Moscow suffer humiliating setbacks on the battlefield.

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