Axpo boss: company hasn’t yet made use of government bailout

The nuclear plant at Beznau, northern Switzerland, operated by Axpo. © Keystone / Michael Buholzer

The president of Axpo’s board of directors Thomas Sieber says the Swiss energy company is determined to try to get through the liquidity crisis on its own steam.

Faced by skyrocketing costs on international energy markets, Axpo was granted a CHF4 billion ($4.1 billion) credit line by the Swiss government earlier this month, a decision Energy Minister Simonetta Sommaruga said was to prevent any financial “wildfires” engulfing crucial energy companies.

In an interview published by newspapers in the CH-Media group on Saturday, Thomas Sieber said that the company still hadn’t touched “a single franc” of it. The bailout funds represent “added security in an extreme situation on energy markets”, Sieber said. But Axpo would “do everything possible to manage through its own means”.

Axpo, one of the big three Swiss energy firms (along with Alpiq and BKW), asked for help in meeting the huge sums being demanded as collateral on energy markets. The company has claimed it is not in financial difficulty as such, and that the money left on the market in the form of guarantees – currently several billion francs, according to Sieber – would be returned once it fulfilled its electricity delivery contracts.

Axpo, which is owned by a group of cantons in central and eastern Switzerland, pledged to forgo bonuses and the paying out of dividends should it formally apply for funding from the bailout. Since the decision, it has come under pressure about whether or not it had pursued a sensible business strategy or whether it had run too many risks on the energy trading market.

The government package is available to Axpo for the next six months.

Minister ups the tone on winter scenario

On Friday on Swiss public television SRF, Economics Minister Guy Parmelin – one of the major faces of the government’s energy policy – reiterated his appeal to citizens to save as much energy as possible ahead of the winter. While supplies are secure now, a sudden shortage in winter would be “a catastrophe for our country and society”, Parmelin said. In such a scenario, power outages due to rationing couldn’t be ruled out. However, he said, it was not yet necessary to declare an official situation of energy scarcity.