3 billion against a positive outcome of 6As sales where the automaker expected sell 9This requires that give meaning to the crisisEurope is sometimes difficult to speak with one voiceA litigant may not benefit from its contradictionsCalifornians of the Senate and the House are the key committees All are capable of passing alliances of circumstance with the other sideWe bet that London does that emerge fine wordsHowever the rural France fears to change pricesThe minority shareholder to win visibilityThe crisis between the Georgia and the Russia knows no respite. While the vast majority of the Russian press compared the Georgian President, Mikhail Saakashvili to Adolf Hitler since the arrest, the end of September, 5 Russian officers accused of espionage, Gazprom has invited in the crisis, last week. Or, more likely, there has been invited by the Kremlin. The semi-public Russian gas export monopoly requires a doubling of the price of its deliveries to the Georgia, at $ 230 the 1,000 cubic metres. Gela Bezhuashvili, the Georgian Foreign Minister, returned Friday empty-handed to a conciliation meeting in Moscow with his counterpart Sergei Lavrov, prior to that he discussed this record burning with colleagues in the Union European, denounced the "political" increase by noting that it would be the price paid by Tbilisi to a level higher than that charged to the countries of Europe of the is, yet more located far and therefore more expensive to buy.
Policy, this increase that arise after a first doubling in 2005, it is certainly. Such as the one imposed in January last to the Ukraine, guilty, as the Georgia, to deviate from the "big brother" Russian attempt to integrate the euro-atlantistes structures. But it also is clear that the price currently paid by the Georgia remains highly subsidized, and that an increase would be legitimate, or even healthy. On behalf of a policy borne by the Kremlin of "truth of prices", the Russia also doubled last year its tariffs to 110 $ the 1,000 cubic metres in the last two allies that much in the former USSR: the Armenia and the Belarus.
A country already highly penalized
But the time chosen to evoke the increase of the gas invoice is due not randomly. It recalled its vulnerability to the Georgia, already struck for three weeks by the interruption of the financial, air, postal, rail connections with the Russia. Measures which are expensive in Tbilisi because they impede the transfer of money from the Georgian diaspora working in Russia. The legal trade between the two countries appears today reduced virtually to Russian gas exports. The Standard & Poor's Agency estimated that the doubling of the price demanded by Gazprom could cost the Georgian GDP 1 point of growth.
The Georgia, which depends almost exclusively on the Russia for its energy supply, nor has the chance to be protected, as the Ukraine, by its location on the path of a gas pipeline supplying Europe. Moscow can easily cut the tap without affecting its other customers, except for the small Armenia. The Georgia, sustained purely verbal way by its US ally, does not appear to have interest to raise the auction, even if it has an asset, brandi recently: its legal ability to block the entrance to the Russia to the world Organization of the trade (WTO).
The crisis between Tbilisi and Moscow should be a turning point on 12 November, with the referendum on independence (not recognized by the international community) organized in the Russian-speaking of South Ossetia region, beyond de facto guardianship of Tbilisi.
