Spain’s EU Commissioner Teresa Ribera mounted a backroom campaign to loosen Brussels’ landmark plan to ban Russian gas, according to five people familiar with the matter, as the bloc strains to kick its remaining reliance on Moscow for energy.
On Tuesday, the EU unveiled a long-awaited legal proposal that aims to snuff out Russian gas imports to the bloc by 2027, as Brussels attempts to crush a vital revenue stream for the Kremlin’s war effort in Ukraine.
But to do so, it also had to overcome a surprising hurdle: the EU’s powerful cleantech chief, a green champion and staunch Ukraine backer.
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According to three EU officials and two EU diplomats, all of whom were granted anonymity to speak freely, Ribera repeatedly intervened as her colleagues in the EU’s executive branch drafted the strategy in recent months. They claim she acted out of fear that Spanish firms would face a barrage of lawsuits from Moscow.
“For five weeks, Ribera was saying no good assessment had been done and the risk of getting sued by the Russians was high,” one of the officials said, arguing the Spanish politician “used her cluster role” as Commission executive vice president to try and weaken the plans.
During that time, Ribera lobbied the inner circle of EU energy chief Dan Jørgensen, who is in charge of the strategy and technically works under her, the official alleged, but his “Cabinet remained solid” and refused to budge on the overall plan.
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Spain, the EU’s third-biggest buyer of Moscow’s liquefied natural gas, would also be impacted by the ban.
Currently, the country is required to buy supplies from Russian firm Novatek until 2042 under a long-term contract signed with domestic energy firm Naturgy. Last year, it imported 4.7 million tons of Moscow’s LNG, according to the Kpler commodities platform.
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Is there even a single OECD government that’s firmly opposed to what Israel is doing, firmly opposed to what Russia is doing, and firmly opposed to fossil fuels? Asking for that doesn’t seem like too much.