Atlantic Council - What will the impact be if Nord Stream 2 is completed? - Transport fees, liability

27 April 2021 - What will the impact be if Nord Stream 2 is completed?

"...THE FINANCIAL EFFECTS if NS2 is completed or not will be significant, but not major. They fall into two groups. One group is redistribution of transit fees in the case of completion of NS2. The other is the sunk construction costs of NS2.

Traditionally, Ukraine has made $3 billion a year on transit fees, which have fallen to less than $2 billion a year now that Russia has reduced its transit volumes after having cut its supplies and diverted them to NS1. Poland and Belarus probably each receive transit fees of about $500 million a year, though Gazprom has seized ownership of the pipeline through Belarus. With the completion of NS2, Germany would receive transit fees on the order of $2 billion a year to transport gas to Southern and Eastern European countries that might have been forced to pay slightly more for the Russian gas...

[MRT: How interesting that the UK has this information in their strategy documents?] 

Because of various legal intricacies, Gazprom was forced to take full ownership of NS2. It was supposed to cost about €9.5 billion, but is probably closer to €11 billion. Gazprom is supposed to finance half of NS2 on its own, while its five Western partner companies are supposed to lend €950 million each to the project. The big legal question is who, if anybody, becomes liable if the project is stopped. If US sanctions stop it, as currently seems likely, nobody is likely to be held responsible, because so far nobody has managed to successfully sue the US Treasury Department over sanctions. If the German government stops the project, it might become liable, since it has previously approved of NS2. A third option is that the European Union, in one of its many forms, blocks the project. It is unlikely that the EU would be liable, as it has never really approved of NS2 but was overrun by the German government..."

[MRT: This is a great argument that the USA did not need to blow-up Nordstream 2 AG pipelines.] 

Note that last week Nordstream filed insurance case in London:

 "Russian-linked Nord Stream files claim after 2022 blast"

   Sikorski moment post here