The murky links between Germany’s political elite and Russian business just got murkier. Gerhard Schröder, ex-chancellor and chairman of Rosneft, Russia’s oil giant, has also been nominated for a seat on the supervisory board of directors of Gazprom, Russia’s state-owned gas giant.
The former SDP Chancellor is on the list of ten new candidates announced by Gazprom today. Elections to the board are due to take place on June 30 at the shareholder’s meeting of the state-owned gas company in St Petersburg but it looks like a slam-dunk that Schroder is the man.
Schröder is the only foreigner on the list and, according to Spiegel, is set to replace Timur Kulibayev on the supervisory board. Kulibayev is the chairman of the Kazenergy Association, and the son-in-law of former Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev, and was nominated by the government for the Kazenergy board last week.
Schröder is no stranger to Russia’s lucrative oil and gas business. He has been head of Rosneft since 2017, and was re-appointed in June last year. Rosneft was one of the companies hit by sanctions from the West after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014. According to the Russian daily newspaper, Kommersant, Schröder was paid a tidy 600,000 euros for his role in 2020.
A long-time gas lobbyist who has repeatedly claimed that Russia has no aggressive intentions towards Ukraine, Schröder’s ties with Gazprom go back to when he left his post as Chancellor. As Chancellor, he supported the now controversial plans for a pipeline to be built between Russia and Germany by the Nord Stream consortium, and an agreement was signed in his last days in office. Once out of the job, he became chairman of the Nord Stream shareholders’ committee and then chief executive of Nord Stream 2 AG.
This latest proposed move to Gazprom will only intensify criticism around Germany’s weak approach towards Russia and its attitude to Ukraine. As Steffen Grimberg reports elsewhere on the site, Chancellor Olaf Scholz is under pressure to toughen up his approach, and has even suggested putting up the Nord Stream pipeline as a way to sanction Russia should President Putin make further moves. What could possibly go wrong. One to watch.
