Gazprom CEO Alexey Miller has held meetings at the Russian Energy Week event in Moscow October 4 with senior officials from eastern Europe.

 

He met Hungary's foreign and trade minister Peter Szijjarto. Three months earlier at a similar Moscow meeting in Moscow, Szijjarto told Gazprom that Hungary wants to link into the company's TurkStream project in order to source more Russian gas, rather than keep waiting for alternative LNG and non-Russian infrastructure projects to advance. Gazprom said both men at this latest meeting "discussed Hungarian operators' plans to develop the country's gas transmission system". Gazprom also noted that Russian supplies to Hungary in January-September 2017 increased by 27% year on year to 5.5bn m³.

 

Miller met Finnish energy group Fortum's CEO Pekka Lundmark at the same event October 4.

 

Fortum, which owns a 29.5% stake in Russian power generator TGC-1, recently made an offer to acquire German utility E.ON's interest in Uniper, which also owns Russian generation assets. Uniper said it had not been consulted on the takeover move which it described as unwelcome. Gazprom said that Miller and Lundmark "discussed issues related to cooperation in the field of power generation and collaboration prospects in the power sector."

Miller met Serbian energy minister Aleksandar Antic on October 3; state-owned gas operator Srbijagaz and Gazprom inked a preliminary agreement in June 2017 to fund feasibility studies into a possible expansion of the former's Banatski Dvor underground gas storage facility.