Brussels, 02/04/2007 (Agence Europe) - At a conference on the EU energy market in Berlin on Thursday, EU Energy Commissioner Andris Piebalgs said the forthcoming third package of energy market opening laws must be the last needed to complete the EU energy market. 'Our energy industry… has the right to expect regulatory certainty after so many years of constant change,' said Piebalgs, adding that he was encouraged by the political support given by member states' leaders at the European Council on March 9 to the ideas in the European Commission's January energy policy and climate change papers. 'I think that the European Council has accepted a clear objective, which I believe can be seen as ensuring that within 2 years all the measures are in place at Community level to guarantee the rapid emergence of a truly competitive, European and sustainable energy market,' said Piebalgs, who set himself this 2009 deadline soon after starting his five-year mandate as an EU commissioner in 2004.
The energy commissioner pointed out that the Commission's main aim was to publish a third package of legislation by the end of 2007, as requested by the March European Council, to ensure the unbundling of vertically integrated energy operators' production and distribution businesses. The Commission's preferred option is ownership unbundling. Piebalgs argued that ownership unbundling did not threaten the EU's security of supply and in fact removed disincentives to invest: 'Experience has shown that unbundled companies can and do attract the capital necessary to build new infrastructure.' He was at pains to downplay the risk of vertically integrated foreign (non-EU) energy companies like Russia's Gazprom buying up the networks: 'No company operating in competitive upstream or downstream markets can control a properly unbundled company.' Ownership unbundling is seen by some, particularly in Germany, as 'expropriation' of property, but Piebalgs pointed out thatcompanies belong to their shareholders, not their management. 'I am sure that an appropriate form of ownership unbundling can be found to guarantee (shareholders') legitimate rights and answer these concerns,' he said. The energy commissioner stressed that ownership unbundling was not back-door privatisation: 'It requires only that two state owned companies are established rather than one.' (eh)