Can you back that up with a source? It's the opposite of what basically everyone has been saying and I can't find anything that even hints that there isn't a fixed settlement currency in their contracts. Russia has been trying to push this issue for weeks, while Germany and others are refusing to pay in anything but euros.
So most of this stuff is not public, so there is no single source to point you to, but from what people have puzzled together on various forums the structure is approximately this (corrections welcome):
ПАО Gazprom (the _actual_ Gazprom; ПАО is a Russian joint-stock company) owns another Russian company (Gazprom Export OOO; OOO is a Russian LLC), which in turn owned Gazprom Germania GmbH (GmbH is a German LLC).
ПАО Gazprom sold gas to Gazprom Export, which in turn sold gas to Gazprom Germania, which in turn sells the gas to the actual European companies.
The change in Russian law which switches the currency to rubles affects the transactions between Gazprom Export OOO and Gazprom Germania GmbH (which were previously both owned by Russia), which made the settlement an "internal" affair of Gazprom for German exports.
(This stuff is fairly well established and you can look at the German & Russian company registers, the legal text of the Russian decree etc. for more detailed information. The next part is less well understood)
Previously this settlement took place through Gazprom Germania sending money from its German account(s) to an account of held in Gazprombank Luxembourg (GPB International S.A., a Luxembourgian Public Limited Company). This account may be a correspondence account for a Gazprombank Russia account owned by Gazprom Export, it's unclear. These funds can be frozen by the EU (and I think are, leading to the Russian claim that they're currently supplying some gas for "free").
With the law change in Russia, this transfer must now happen to a new type of currency account established by Gazprombank Russia (though it's unclear / not publicly known how those are backed, e.g. whether it's also through correspondent accounts at GBP International S.A.) where it is automatically sold and converted into rubles, which are then transferred to Gazprom Export in Russia.
Now an important bit that most people don't seem to get is that none of this affects pricing, it's akin to a change in payment method. The supply contracts between e.g. the European gas purchasers and Gazprom Germania have complicated pricing schemes which are likely tied to one or more currencies (EUR & USD) and Russia is sticking to those pricing agremeents - but insisting on changing how the settlement happens.
What is kind of unclear at the moment is what Gazprom stands to gain from the sale (and subsequent (attempted?) liquidation of Gazprom Germania). There are a handful of theories about this, but in practice we probably won't know for a while.
The Luxembourg entities are not on the EU sanctions list[0]. That entity will essentially own Russia's Euro reserves from now on.
It's not as if this hasn't happened before. The 'EuroDollar' came about after the invasion of Hungary in 1956. Russia has just invented the 'RuskiEuro', which is how the Bank of Russia will hold Euros for the duration - probably in settlement accounts at the National Clearing Centre in Moscow.
> 'EuroDollar' came about after the invasion of Hungary in 1956
The first known eurodollar account was opened in France for China during the Korean War, in 1949 [1]. The phenomenon is a result of the Marshall Plan, which left lots of physical dollars overseas and thus outside U.S. jurisdiction.
I agree. And since the RuskiEuro will be backed by a massive amount of commodity it'll be fairly hard currency. Zoltan Poszar has been clear on this[0].
My gut feeling is, that the EU, without any commodities, has a single choice: kick the Russian gas habit immediately, and force Russia to kill their western gas fields. Then pray they collapse in the next few years.
If the EU keeps paying - Russia's new Gazprom central bank controlled RuskiEuro reserves will stabilize its economy and it will rise like a phoenix from the ashes. Even if we kick the gas habit, this might still happen if Putin keeps his thumb on public sentiment enough.
President Trump was right about the gas terminal, North Stream 2 and ≥2% GDP for NATO militaries. Of course it was coming from his advisors. But no, the EU leadership decided to live in fantasy land. Only Eastern European states, Poland and the Baltics understood.
