Putin’s game in European energy: divide and conquer

Vladimir Putin’s efforts to divide the West may be on the back foot now that Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel have decided to stop being beastly to the Americans, but his most effective attack dog — Gazprom — is gleefully setting EU countries against each other.

For governments fixated on more immediate threats such as radical Islam, this might seem footling stuff. But the struggle by OMV, Austria’s biggest oil and gas company, to snap up its Hungarian counterpart MOL (pron. ‘mole’) provides a perfect insight into the underworld of the Central European energy business: all the more so because at first sight Gazprom’s hand is invisible.

OMV has been eyeing MOL on and off since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and has made several unsuccessful approaches in the past. Then this summer Megdet Rahimkulov, a Russian banker and former Gazprom executive, started buying MOL stock on the Budapest stock exchange.