The first Western company whose business was confiscated by Russia and transferred to state ownership has decided to take legal action. The Finnish energy concern Fortum, which owned a network of thermal power plants in Russia before the war, including one of the largest and most modern Nagyanskaya TPP in the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Okrug, has filed a lawsuit and is initiating arbitration proceedings against Russia, the company's press service said, as cited by The Moscow Times.
The concern, which is the largest in Finland's energy sector and is more than half owned by the country's government, is demanding compensation for its assets and investments. Fortum does not name the exact amount, estimating it at "billions of euros".
In April, Russian dictator Putin signed a decree transferring Rosmayn to the temporary management of PJSC Fortum, the Russian subsidiary of the Finnish concern.
Fortum called Russia's actions a violation of international law and said that it had effectively lost control of the Russian company and, as a result, wrote off these assets, recording a loss of €1.7 billion.
"This initiative mirrors the attitudes of Western governments towards the foreign assets of Russian companies," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov explained at the time.
According to him, the main purpose of Putin's decree was to "form a compensation fund" in response to the "illegal expropriation of Russian assets abroad".
Fortum entered the Russian market in 2007 during the period of the UES reform. Along with the Finnish concern, the German energy giant Uniper also invested in Russian power plants, whose assets were also nationalised in April 2023.
The third foreign company to enter the Russian market during the reform period, Italian Enel, managed to sell its energy company to Lukoil last year.