May 7, 2009, 20:48 GMT
Budapest - Hungary's largest gas distribution company Emfesz has been sold to Swiss-based firm RosGas AG, Emfesz spokesman Igor Gallyas said Thursday, confirming a report in the Russian newspaper Vedomosti.
The news has prompted speculation that the Russian energy giant Gazprom, which is believed to be behind RosGas, is looking to strengthen its hold over the Hungarian, and by extension, the EU market.
Gallyas, speaking to the Hungarian news agency MTI, neither confirmed nor denied the report by Vedomosti that RosGas is part of Gazprom's family of subsidiaries.
However, in a statement posted on its website on April 28, Emfesz said that RosGas is indeed part of Gazprom's network of business interests.
This claim was dismissed at the time by Gazprom press secretary Sergei Kupriyanov.
'RosGas has nothing to do with Gazprom and does not belong to the Gazprom group,' Kupriyanov said.
Emfesz is the largest player on Hungary's deregulated gas market, handling around a quarter of all imports.
It was, until now, indirectly owned by the Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash through a Cyprus-based holding company called Mabofi.
Mabofi issued a statement on Thursday claiming that the sale of Emfesz had been conducted without the knowledge or assent of the directors or the owner.
In the statement, Mabofi director David Brown said the firm intends to fight to retain ownership of Emfesz through the Swiss, Hungarian and Cypriate courts.
'Mabofi discovered on the morning of the 6th May 2009, that the shares in Emfesz had been fraudulently transferred to a Swiss company registered in Zug, Switzerland, RosGas AG,' the statement ran.
The whole transaction appears to be part of a tangled web of conflicting interests and complicated ownership structures.
According to Mabofi, one of the directors of RosGas is a Hungarian lawyer who also works for Emfesz. Mabofi claimed this lawyer assisted the managing director of Emfesz, Istvan Goczi, in arranging the sale of the firm.
Among Dmitry Firtash's other business interests is a 45-per-cent stake in RosUkrEnergo, another Swiss-registered, firm that until January had a stranglehold on the transit of Russian gas through Ukraine to Europe. Gazprom owns 50 per cent of this company.
The Russian energy giant stopped supplying RosUkrEnergo with gas during the crisis in January when a dispute over pricing between Ukraine and Russia led to shortages across Central Europe.
After the crisis in January, the Ukrainian authorities denied RosUkrEnergo access to 11 billion cubic metres of gas stored in Ukraine that the firm maintains it owns.
Emfesz announced at the end of April that it would temporarily stop importing gas from Ukraine as it switched suppliers, from RosUkrEnergo to the hitherto obscure RosGas.
Your Talkback on this Story