Ukrainian Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko has long been advocating the elimination of RosUkrEnergo, calling it a ‘criminal enterprise’ and linking it to corruption in the gas industry as far back as 2005.  Now analysts are discussing the possibility that the Russia-Ukraine gas row may have been caused by a dispute about this intermediary company, joint owned by Russian and Ukrainian interests and domiciled in Switzerland, which buys Russian gas for onward transmission to Europe.  A former Chevron executive quoted in yesterday’s Bloomberg suggests that the row is not about pricing, but about ‘who gets a bigger piece of the pie in the re-export business to Europe, as well as who gets the more lucrative domestic market in Ukraine’.

A Gazprom spokesman suggested that current troubles may relate to the fact that certain ‘political forces’ in Ukraine want to keep RosUkrEnergo in place as an intermediary.  Naftogaz, on the other hand, insists that it isn’t interested in using an intermediary – but how much does this have to do with the two lawsuits filed by RosUkrEnergo against Naftogaz just last week for ‘failing to honor its commitments’, ordering it to pay debts of $614 million?