{"id":7383,"date":"2024-12-20T10:48:04","date_gmt":"2024-12-20T10:48:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/expertforum.ro\/en\/?p=7383"},"modified":"2025-01-13T14:49:39","modified_gmt":"2025-01-13T14:49:39","slug":"ciolacu-and-viktor-orban-put-romania-in-gazproms-tow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/expertforum.ro\/en\/ciolacu-and-viktor-orban-put-romania-in-gazproms-tow\/","title":{"rendered":"Ciolacu and Viktor Orban put Romania in Gazprom’s tow"},"content":{"rendered":"

EFOR warns that during Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s visit to Bucharest today, he is likely to strike a dubious gas and electricity deal with Marcel Ciolacu.<\/em> Meanwhile, this week the Romanian government is promoting a “project of strategic importance” to unsustainably increase gas consumption.<\/em> The two would make Romania highly dependent on Russian gas, with the support and complicity of Viktor Orban.<\/em><\/p>\n

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On Monday, December 16, the Hungarian company MVM signed an agreement with E.ON Romania to take over the gas and electricity supply assets. MVM paid well above the market price (\u20ac200 million, compared to the estimated \u20ac100-120 million offered by competitors), indicating that there is more than just commercial motives at play. The deal now depends only on the approval of a commission that monitors foreign investment (CEISD<\/em>) for possible adverse external influences, but it is expected to be approved. E.ON currently holds virtually half of the gas supply in the household segment and is also a major supplier of electricity.<\/p>\n

Yesterday, December 19, the Romanian government declared the project to build a 1770MW gas-fired power plant (at Mintia, Hunedoara) a project of “strategic national importance”. The investment belongs to a dubious Jordanian investor – Mass Group Holding – which bought the equipment from Siemens and will be connected to the gas grid with a pipeline supported by EU funds from the Modernization Fund. This project has so far not raised too many suspicions in the EU because no one really expected the investment to actually take place: it makes no economic sense in a normal market<\/strong>. All the more so as the direction across the EU is to reduce, not increase, gas consumption by 30% by 2030. If the plant is completed, it will consume 2.5 billion cubic meters of gas per year, about 30% of Romania’s total consumption today. The plant will become operational in 2025 (860MW) and 2026 (up to 1770MW).<\/p>\n

Mass Group Holding reportedly signed a pre-agreement with MVM a few months ago to purchase all the gas needed to produce electricity.<\/p>\n

Viktor Orban is coming to Bucharest today, December 20, to meet the Romanian Prime Minister. Marcel Ciolacu is hinting these days either that he will be the next prime minister or that he is pulling the PSD out of the governing coalition, in a dubious image game that is hard to understand. It is possible that part of the explanation may be that they want to jam the debate with other topics of discussion in order to make the deal with Viktor Orban less noticed.<\/p>\n

In all likelihood, MVM’s plan is to buy Russian gas at a reduced price, sell it on to the Mass Group and receive cheap electricity in exchange, thus gaining a significant share of the Romanian market, which is captive to Russian energy supplies, in the next few years<\/strong>. De facto, through this scheme, we are building in Romania the equivalent of what the Cuciurgan power plant in Transnistria is for Moldova<\/strong>, which has created a deadly dependence of Moldova on Russian energy supplies over the last two decades.<\/p>\n

MVM is also expected to push for the continuation of gas transit through Ukraine after January 1, precisely to get the gas needed for this deal. At the moment, MVM is extremely vocal in Europe on the issue, along with Slovak companies, putting enormous pressure on the European Commission to continue the transit of Russian gas through Ukraine. What Viktor Orban and the PSD-PNL government led by Ciolacu are up to will critically affect not only Romania’s energy security, but also the planned decoupling of the EU from Russian gas. There will also be a direct threat to Moldova’s energy supply.<\/p>\n

Expert Forum (EFOR) yesterday sent a letter to Teresa Ribera, the new Executive Vice-President for a Clean, Fair and Competitive Transition of the European Commission, asking her to analyze the risks of MVM taking over the supply of E.ON from Romania<\/strong>, taking into account also Spain’s experience of blocking Hungarian railway supply because of suspected links with Russia. I asked him to look at the issue in the broader context of pressure from Slovakia and Hungary to continue the transit of Russian gas through Ukraine after January 1, 2025<\/strong> (whether hypocritically labeled as Azeri gas, or transparently as Russian, as it is in reality).<\/p>\n

The Romanian government has consistently acted in recent years in the unfortunate direction of expanding gas consumption in Romania, with measures ranging from encouraging the introduction of gas to all households to building more gas-fired power plants. If all of this materializes, Romania’s gas consumption<\/strong> will<\/strong> increase by 50% by 2030<\/strong>, making the country dependent on supplies from Russia, as domestic production will not be able to keep up with the increase in consumption. This dependence on Russia has been actively promoted by Transgaz, which has also stubbornly delayed interconnections with other countries and the reverse flow to Moldova and Ukraine for years.<\/p>\n

It really cannot be believed that these delays are caused only by stupidity and incompetence and not by years of active promotion of Russian interests. Just as the policy of increasing gas consumption for domestic consumers, when the whole of Europe is reducing it, by expanding gas networks cannot be just stupidity, but a conscious and programmed deepening of future dependencies. The government’s approval as a ‘project of strategic importance’ of the Mintia power station, which will increase our national consumption by 30%, also raises suspicions at a time when, on the other hand, we are canceling elections so as not to hand the country over to obscure influences and Russia is desperate to return to the European gas market.<\/p>\n

In the letter EFOR also asked the European Commission to consider investigating Russian interests in Transgaz<\/strong>. Just as Hungary has in recent years become an obvious source of bottlenecks for electricity and gas flows in the EU single market, and has acted to decouple the Western Balkans, Bulgaria and Greece from the rest of the EU market, Romania is now likely to follow the same path, through decisions of the PSD-PNL government, in complicity with Viktor Orban and to the benefit of Russia.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

EFOR warns that during Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s visit to Bucharest today, he is likely to strike a dubious gas and electricity deal with Marcel Ciolacu. Meanwhile, this week the Romanian government is promoting a “project of strategic importance” to unsustainably increase gas consumption. The two would make Romania highly dependent on Russian gas, with ···<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7386,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7383","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-stiri"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/expertforum.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7383","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/expertforum.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/expertforum.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/expertforum.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/expertforum.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7383"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/expertforum.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7383\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/expertforum.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7386"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/expertforum.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/expertforum.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/expertforum.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}