Court in Amsterdam seizes TurkStream operator's assets, media report

A Dutch court in Amsterdam has seized the assets of South Stream Transport (SST), the Dutch company that operates the TurkStream gas pipeline and is owned by Russian gas giant Gazprom. The move came at the request of DTEK Krymenergo, a company belonging to Ukraine's richest man, Rinat Akhmetov, Russian newspaper Vedomosti reported on its website, citing court documents.

Until Russia annexed the Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea in the spring of 2014, Akhmetov's DTEK group was the largest shareholder in Krymenergo, with a 57.49 percent stake. The company supplied the peninsula with electricity. In 2015, Russian-installed Crimean authorities created a new company with the same name and transferred Crimea's electricity grid to it. The Ukrainian company relocated from Simferopol to Kyiv after the annexation.

In November two years ago, an arbitration court in The Hague ordered Russia, at DTEK's request, to pay the Ukrainian company $207.8 million (about CZK 4.33 billion) in compensation for losses resulting from the expropriation of its Crimean assets. Moscow appealed. This July, a court in Amsterdam froze SST's bank accounts to secure DTEK's claims against Russia. In August, SST appealed to the Amsterdam court but was unsuccessful; the court instead ordered it to pay DTEK's legal costs.

According to Russian newspaper Vedomosti, a court in London authorized Russia in May to pay DTEK's claim, but enforcement of the ruling was suspended until the court in The Hague rules on Russia's appeal.