(Bloomberg) -- Uniper SE has taken its first steps to repay the German government for a historic bailout at the height of the energy crisis as Berlin prepares to sell the utility.
The company said it paid the state €530 million ($578 million) in late September from funds that it set aside after winning an arbitration ruling against former Russian supplier Gazprom PJSC. Early next year it will transfer another €2.5 billion linked to the state aid it received, according to a statement, though the total amount may still change based on its full-year results.
While the sums are relatively small compared to the shortfall in Germany’s 2025 budget, Uniper said they should be regarded as repayments to taxpayers. The €13.5 billion bailout in 2022 was one of the largest rescues in the country’s corporate history, after the company — once the biggest buyer of Russian gas in Germany — was forced to pay hundreds of millions of euros a day for alternative supplies.
A ruling in June allowed Uniper to cancel payment obligations to Gazprom and offset those amounts against damages it’s owed. The German company was awarded more than €13 billion in damages in total, but it’s unclear how much more of that amount it will be able to recover.
Berlin, which now owns more than 99% of Uniper, will get additional proceeds when it sells the utility. At the time of the nationalization, the state agreed to reduce its holding to a maximum of 25% plus one share by 2028. In September, Germany’s finance ministry said it was preparing to re-privatize the company, with a share sale its preferred option.
The government recently appointed Citigroup Inc., Deutsche Bank AG and UBS Group AG as joint global coordinators on the potential offering, Bloomberg News reported in October.
Uniper said earnings remain in line with a more positive outlook presented in August, putting it on stable footing for a potential sale. The firm expects adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization of €1.9 billion to €2.4 billion in 2024, and generated €2.2 billion in the first nine months.
While that’s well below 2023’s results, the company’s earnings have made a substantial recovery since the energy crisis.
“Uniper’s nine-month operating performance was stable in an increasingly normalized market environment,” Uniper’s chief financial officer Jutta Dönges said. “We can therefore reaffirm our outlook for the 2024 financial year that we revised upward in August.”
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