RWE Sees End of Europe’s 40-Year-Old Gas Pricing for Gazprom

RWE AG expects a 40-year-old system for setting European gas prices that has cost Germany’s second-largest utility hundreds of millions of euros to be cast aside after an arbitration ruling against Russia’s OAO Gazprom.

A Vienna tribunal decided RWE paid Gazprom too much from May 2010 and the Moscow-based gas-export monopoly needed to introduce market rates for the fuel, according to the German power producer. In reaction, Russian President Vladimir Putin defended the decades-old regime of linking rates to oil indexes.