The nationalised German power importer Uniper has pledged to develop into worthwhile once more even because it introduced a web lack of €19bn final 12 months after Vladimir Putin lower Europe’s provides of Russian fuel.

The corporate, which is 99 per cent owned by the German authorities after an emergency bailout final 12 months, was as soon as Europe’s largest importer of pure fuel from Gazprom. However it started racking up enormous losses after Moscow decreased provides to Germany by means of the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, prompting fears that it might collapse.

Klaus-Dieter Maubach, the chief government, mentioned that Uniper was “at its core a robust firm that has efficiently acquired by means of essentially the most troublesome 12 months in its historical past”.

Maubach, who has introduced that he’ll go away the corporate, mentioned that the duty of his successors can be “to proceed to develop Uniper and make it worthwhile once more”.

He provided no element of how the corporate deliberate to try this after the battle in Ukraine upended its enterprise mannequin.

However Uniper mentioned that the problem of changing Russian fuel can be overcome by the top of 2024 on the newest, and promised to part out monetary help from the German state.

Though the €19.1bn web loss is about half the €40bn loss the corporate had initially predicted because of decrease than anticipated prices for changing Russian fuel, the determine continues to be huge — and underlines the challenges dealing with an organization whose bailout by German taxpayers is ready to value as a lot as €51bn.

Underneath strict circumstances set out by the EU when it accredited final 12 months’s authorities bailout, the corporate agreed to divest a string of belongings, dedicated to not develop its market place in gross sales and to grant opponents entry to its transport and storage capacities.