Russia’s Gazprom and Greece’s natural gas grid operator DESFA will sign a deal on June 7 to build the Greek portion of South Stream, a Russian-led natural gas pipeline project, an official said on Monday. “The deal will be signed in Moscow,” DESFA spokesman Sotiris Hiotakis told Reuters. Under the provisions of the agreement, DESFA and Gazprom will each have a 50 percent stake in the Athens-based joint venture which will build and manage the part of South Stream running through Greece, Hiotakis said.
Gazprom-led South Stream has been designed to bypass Ukraine to transport Russian gas under the Black Sea and onward to Western Europe. It is a rival to the EU-backed Nabucco pipeline to bring gas from central Asia and Iran. Greece joined the South Stream project in 2008 as part of efforts to increase domestic use of natural gas and become a transit country for the commodity. The Greek section of South Stream, which will run from the Bulgarian-Greek border to Greece’s western coast, is estimated to cost up to 1 billion euros ($1.24 billion).