Uniper’s Crafty Legal Tactic Helped It Recoup Millions From Gazprom

In late 2023, Uniper finally started to receive some money from Gazprom's debtors. Photographer: Lukas Schulze/Getty Images Photo by Lukas Schulze /Photographer: Lukas Schulze/Gett

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(Bloomberg) — When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the effects in Europe were immediate. 

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The offensive not only abruptly curtailed gas supplies to the continent, it also dismantled decade-old agreements between European utilities and Russian energy giant Gazprom. That triggered an energy crisis, leaving Europe’s biggest suppliers — Italy’s Eni, France’s Engie, Austria’s OMV and Germany’s Uniper and RWE — facing billions in losses. 

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To recoup that money, the companies sued Gazprom, setting off an onslaught of arbitration proceedings. While standard among corporate players, arbitration typically takes years to resolve. RWE, for example, announced in March that it had won its case – roughly three years after filing. Orlen, a Polish supplier, is still in arbitration. Whether RWE or any of the other plaintiffs have been able to collect remains unclear.

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Within this legal morass, however, one company stands out: Uniper SE, which announced earlier this year that it has received payouts. The company, once the biggest German buyer of gas from Moscow, received an amount in the three-digit millions, according to a person familiar. It declined to say how much it collected. 

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Uniper did so by relying on a clever legal tactic that enabled it to get favorable rulings on an accelerated timeline, potentially saving itself years of waiting.

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Spokespeople for Engie, RWE, VNG, OMV and Orlen declined to comment. A spokesperson for Uniper declined to comment about the company’s legal tactics. Gazprom and Eni did not respond to request for comment. 

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Alongside arbitration, which is often how corporations choose to resolve disputes, Uniper’s lawyers also filed a request for an emergency ruling in the summer of 2022 in a regional court in Weiden, a small Bavarian city on the border with the Czech Republic which is also the entry point for gas deliveries from Russia. They won that ruling, then sought a €5 billion advance to enforce it. 

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The Weiden judges denied the payment request, so Uniper appealed to a court in Nuremberg. A month later, that court sided with Uniper’s argument and gave the company permission to collect €3.65 billion. It then won another ruling for €3.79 billion. And on the last day of 2022, Uniper won a third ruling for €576 million, bringing the total to around €8 billion. The company wouldn’t win its parallel arbitration case – which resulted in an additional award of €13.5 billion – until June 2024.  

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Other companies weren’t necessarily able to pursue the same approach, explained Tino Schneider, a litigator at A&O Shearman in Frankfurt, because the strategy can only be enacted under a narrow set of circumstances.