REUTERS
The European Commission (EC) wants to get access to all the information about commercial gas contracts to be concluded by European buyers with non-European suppliers, including Russia's Gazprom, according to Russian newspaper Kommersant.
The publication reports that it obtained two draft laws of the European Commission which were said to become the basic documents for the EU Energy Union whose creation is under way.
The first document is related to the creation of a mechanism to exchange information about intergovernmental energy agreements that are being prepared or that have been concluded. The second draft law proposes substantive amendments to the EU Directive concerning measures to safeguard security of gas supply, adopted in the wake of the Russian-Ukrainian gas crisis in 2009.
The first draft law states that none of the EU member countries will be able to sign an intergovernmental energy agreement without the EC's approval. It is noted that when individual EU countries negotiate international energy agreements with other countries, they should share information containing in these agreements with the EC. Moreover, the EC may send its observer to the negotiations to ensure that these agreements do not violate EU laws. The final agreement must be approved in Brussels before signing and ratification.
Yet, the proposed amendment does not apply to commercial contracts and therefore the EC proposes that all gas suppliers from outside the EU should be obliged to provide data about their long-term (more than 12 months) gas contracts.
The EC wants to know about the duration of a contract, the minimum and maximum daily, monthly and annual volumes of gas deliveries, gas acceptance points, as well as contract terms for the termination of supplies.
But the key provision of the draft document is that the EC will be able to access not only to non-price information, but to the content of the entire contract. If a local regulator or the EC decides that a contract could undermine security of energy supplies, the EC has the right to request the contract with all its annexes attached from a buyer to assess its impact on security.
In this way, the EC may officially get constant access to information about Gazprom's prices and individual formulas for each country, Kommersant concludes.