RWE AG previously said to get rid of a link in oil prices with gas supply contracts, contracts that have cost Germany's second-largest utility hundreds of millions of euros, they must win an arbitration against Russia's OAO Gazprom.
RWE, upon completion the arbitration proceedings, was the lone European customer of Russia's gas-export giant. EON SE, a larger rival, reached a settlement last year.
"We have a solution which partly replaces oil indexation by gas indexation," Bernhard Guenther, RWE's Chief Financial Officer, said in an interview at the company's head office in Essen, Germany. "Going forward we will claw the small money back which we might now still lose on the remaining oil-indexed part because it will be taken into consideration in the new talks we are in."
While the conditions of the award were held confidential, seeing the dispute through to the end was a fruitful decision, claimed RWE's Guenther. RWE has struggled for more flexibility on long-term agreements as declining gas demand in Germany created a gap between the cost of importing fuel and the revenues it raised from consumers.
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