Wikipedia
''' Wintershall Holding GmbH ''' is Germany's largest crude oil and natural gas producer. The company is based in Kassel, Germany. Wintershall is a wholly owned subsidiary of BASF, based in Ludwigshafen. The name Wintershall is derived from the surname of the enterprise co-founder Carl Julius Winter and the Old High German word for salt (hall) together.
The company made a profit of 2.4 billion euros in 2011. In 2012, the company had 2164 employees worldwide.hr-online: '' property of contacts to Siberia pay themselves out '', conditions: August 2006 The Chairman of the board of Executive Directors is Mario Mehren.
In September 2015, Wintershall's parent group BASF traded 100% of the company's gas distribution and storage business and 50% of its gas exploration arm, Wintershall Noordzee, for 25%-plus-one-share of Gazprom's Achimov deposits in Western Siberia's Urengoy oil, gas and condensate field in . BASF had in 2013 signed a memorandum of understanding on the assets swap but the deal ran into trouble because of US and EU sanctions against Russia and the state-controlled Russian gas producer and exporter over the government in Moscow's 2014 annexation of Crimea and policy on separatist violence in eastern Ukraine. Under a binding contract signed on September 4 2015 by Gazprom chair Alexey Miller and his opposite number at BASF, Kurt Bock at the Russian government's Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, the German group would invest in and develop Blocks 4A and 5A of the Achimov gas and gas condensate deposits in the Urengoy gas field with Gazprom. Blocks 4A and 5A of the Achimov deposits held estimated reserves of about 274 billion cu m of gas and 74 million t of condensate, Gazprom said.
About six months earlier, Wintershall's chief executive, Rainer Seeleive, had told Düsseldorf's Handelsblatt business daily: "The crisis between the West and Russia escalated at the end of the year and Brussels was constantly issuing warnings about being too dependent on Russian gas. Gazprom started getting doubts about whether it was really wanted in Europe as an investor. But of course we were unable to take a major opportunity to expand our cooperation with Gazprom even further...We sat down together and agreed that the underlying conditions – especially the political conditions – had worsened to the extent that the asset swap no longer made sense...It will take a long time to normalize relations [between Germany and Russia] again...The key to resolving the crisis lies in Ukraine. The first task is to bring peace to the country...Then we have to make sure economic stability takes hold again quickly. We must do this together. Only then will we be able to gradually rebuild the trust between Russia, the Ukraine and the West again."