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Employees at a Uniper gas storage facility: The company has filed claims for the gas levy
Photo: ANDREAS GEBERT / REUTERS
Who will benefit from the planned gas surcharge?
According to the long-distance gas network operator, a total of twelve companies have registered their claims in good time.
This emerges from a list from the operator association Trading Hub Europe (THE) (you can find the original of the document here).
Accordingly, the following companies want to claim money from the gas surcharge:
The troubled energy company Uniper
The Leipzig gas trader VNG
The utility company EWE based in Oldenburg
The former Gazprom subsidiary Sefe and subsidiary Wingas
The German subsidiary of the Austrian energy group OMV
The Swiss energy group Axpo
Commodity trading firms Vitol, Gunvor, DXT Commodities and Enet Energy
The energy company RWE has also filed claims from the gas surcharge.
However, this is only a "precautionary measure," said a spokeswoman when asked by SPIEGEL.
There are currently no plans to take the levy.
THE did not say how high the demands of the individual companies were.
Overall, the companies reported around 34 billion euros as a forecast value.
"This does not yet represent a verified claim," says the long-distance gas network operator.
The values would only become concrete later.
According to current plans, the gas surcharge of 2.4 cents will be levied until the end of March 2024.
The gas surcharge is intended to relieve companies that have to buy gas elsewhere for a lot of money to fulfill their contracts because of the reduced deliveries from Russia.
They are currently not allowed to pass on their additional costs, the levy should compensate for 90 percent of these costs from October.
This is intended to prevent company bankruptcies and ultimately delivery failures.
When asked by the "Handelsblatt", the Swiss energy trader Axpo stated that it was only affected to a minor extent.
Nevertheless, the company "must currently procure the energy that is not supplied at much higher costs" in order to be able to comply with the existing contracts with customers in Germany, said a spokesman for the newspaper.
According to the report, Axpo and Gunvor increased their sales by 100 percent and 200 percent respectively in the first half of the year.
mic/che/AFP