Alternate Minister of Foreign Affairs, Miltiadis Varvitsiotis described the results of the EU Summit on Energy as a “huge step for the European Union”, speaking today to ERT1 and journalists Kostas Papachlimintzos and Christina Vidou from Brussels, where he is accompanying the Prime Minister.
As Mr. Varvitsiotis emphasized, the first critical step is establishing a common EU gas market to cover 15% of the storage potential. Furthermore, he underscored that issues such as ways to intervene in the gas price formation mechanism and the decoupling of gas prices from electricity prices, ideas first proposed by Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis in March and now becoming European policy, are now on the table for the first time. “I can tell you that as a member of the negotiating team, I feel proud that once again Greece is proposing measures to the EU which are finally becoming European policy”, he pointedly said.
The Alternate Minister stated that with these policies Europe is sending a clear message to the markets that the stock market “party” concerning gas prices cannot continue, and to energy suppliers that Europe is treating them as a whole, rather than as individual countries. He noted that there has already been a de-escalation of prices since the European Commission started to incorporate Greece’s proposals, and estimated that a further de-escalation of prices is expected following yesterday’s European Council decisions.