China’s $1.7 trillion hangover

China’s $1.7 trillion hangover

Up to 40% of China’s $1.7 trillion LGFV loans are at high risk of default. What’s a panicking Beijing to do?

EuromoneyFXNews.com

EuromoneyFXNews.com

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September 2003

More heat than light

by Ben Aris

The Kremlin is in two minds about Gazprom. It's a monolithic tool of Russian geopolitics but there are also plans to make it part of a more diversified, liberalized energy industry.


The official headquarters of Eural Transgas, a gas-trading company that handles Russian energy company Gazprom's gas-transit business between Turkmenistan and Ukraine.
IT IS A slightly run-down but otherwise unremarkable residential block in the middle-class part of Cluj-Napoca, the capital of the Transylvania region of Romania. From the outside there is not much to distinguish the three apartments in the building from their neighbours.

But they are the official headquarters of Eural Transgas, a gas-trading company that handles Russian energy company Gazprom's gas-transit business between Turkmenistan and Ukraine. The neighbours might be interested to learn that the firm behind those anonymous doors earned up to a billion dollars in fees last year.

On the day Euromoney drops by, no-one answers the doorbell. But it's known that the company is an active player in the high-level wheeling and dealing of eastern Europe's energy business. In June, British company JKX Oil & Gas...


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