E.ON Gaz Romania, the natural gas supplier and distributor that became part of the German E.ON Ruhrgas group last year will have professional service company PricewaterhouseCoopers, one of the biggest companies in its line of business, as auditor starting early next year.
"The audit contract with PwC has a one-year maturity," E.ON Gaz Romania representatives stated. The contract will come into force on December 31, 2006, according to an announcement in the Official Gazette.
As for the strategic advice, E.ON Gaz Romania works with Roland Berger Strategy Consultants, in order to integrate the structure in Romania into the organisation of the German group. This entails separating distribution operations from supplying operations first of all, which has to be done by July 2007, according to the applicable European provisions.
The privatisation of the major energy companies has generated significant revenues for the players on the professional service market over the last two or three years. The audit and consultancy firms got very important accounts to manage once the monopoly of the state over one of the biggest sectors the economy, the energy sector, was broken.
German E.ON group is one of the most important investors on the domestic energy market and the only one that managed to have the same area covered in terms of both gas and electricity distribution.
The natural gas distribution company E.ON Gaz Romania posted net losses of 121 million RON (36.4 million euros) and turnover of 2.09 billion RON (576.8 million euros) last year.
The losses were caused by the increase in the price of the natural gas bought by the company, which was higher than the increase in the rates paid by the end users. E.ON Gaz management anticipates to cover acquisition costs in 2006.
PricewaterhouseCoopers, a company part of the so-called Big Four of the market it operates on, along with KPMG, Ernst & Young and Deloitte, was involved in one of the biggest privatisation processes in Romania, providing consulting services to the state for the sale of Electrica Muntenia Sud, the most valuable electricity distributor of Electrica.
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