BERLIN — German federal law enforcement authorities have launched a new wave of targeted raids this week as part of an ongoing investigation into an alleged plot to disrupt the country’s critical natural gas infrastructure, a scheme prosecutors link to a murky 2022 corporate transaction involving the former German subsidiary of Russian energy giant Gazprom.
On Wednesday, police carried out coordinated search operations across two major German cities: they examined a Berlin property tied to the primary suspect, a second site belonging to an individual not facing any allegations in the case, and the office of an unnamed commercial entity based in Frankfurt. Officials confirmed that no arrests were made during the execution of the search warrants.
In an official statement released following the operations, prosecutors outlined the charges under investigation: the unnamed suspect, a Russian national, faces accusations of acting as an accessory to two offenses — violation of foreign trade investment regulations, and attempted anti-constitutional sabotage against the German state.
The controversy dates back to 2022, just weeks after Russia launched its full-scale military invasion of Ukraine. At that time, Gazprom’s Moscow headquarters announced it would divest from its German subsidiary, Gazprom Germania. The unapproved buyer immediately moved to liquidate the subsidiary, a step that violates German law, which prohibits liquidation before a cross-border business purchase receives official regulatory approval.
Acting quickly to protect national energy security, German authorities placed Gazprom Germania under the control of a state-run oversight agency, blocking the attempted liquidation. The federal government emphasized at the time that the subsidiary played a critical role in Germany’s natural gas trade, transmission, and storage networks. Shortly after the intervention, Berlin fully nationalized the entity, which now operates under the name Securing Energy for Europe.
Prosecutors now lay out a clear allegation: the sale of Gazprom Germania to a little-known Moscow-based firm with no prior experience in the energy sector, followed by the immediate push for liquidation, was a deliberate attempt to destabilize Germany’s natural gas supply. Germany has been one of the most prominent international backers of Ukraine amid the ongoing invasion, making its energy infrastructure a potential target. The suspect is accused of intentionally facilitating the liquidation effort to advance this disruptive goal.
This investigation unfolds against a backdrop of sweeping shifts in Germany’s energy policy in the wake of the Ukraine war. In the months following the invasion, Berlin rushed to cut its longstanding reliance on Russian natural gas imports. By late 2022, Russia had completely halted all remaining gas shipments to Germany. Just weeks after that cut-off, mysterious undersea explosions caused massive damage to the Nord Stream dual pipelines, the undersea infrastructure built explicitly to carry Russian natural gas to Germany under the Baltic Sea.