London/Moscow: The executive who spent more than a decade turning a Gazprom PJSC unit into a global energy trader has left the company.
Vitaly Vasiliev, the chief executive officer of Gazprom’s trading arm in London, left as part of a restructuring drive, a person with direct knowledge of the matter said, asking not to be identified because the matter is private. Vasiliev was also on Friday replaced as one of the managing directors at Gazprom’s German subsidiary.
Vasiliev became head of Gazprom Marketing & Trading Ltd in London in 2004 when the unit was renamed. The division was set up in 1999 with two people first trading just natural gas. It has since grown into a trader with more than 900 people with offices from Singapore to Houston and is active in markets including LNG, crude oil, carbon and foreign exchange.
The latest changes follow a turbulent few years. Frederic Barnaud, a chief commercial officer responsible for LNG, oil and shipping, left in 2017 after more than nine years to join Singapore’s Pavilion Energy Pte this month.
In 2016 it emerged that the company planned to cut staff because of a drop in earnings from LNG, and planned to reduce 20 per cent to 25 per cent of positions, mainly back-office personnel in London. That followed speculation in 2015 about moving the unit to St Petersburg.
At Wingas GmbH, which sells Gazprom’s gas in Germany, Ludwig Moehring, Vasiliev and Dmitry Kotulskiy were replaced by Lavrenty Pilyagin and Slawa Margulis as managing directors, according to its website.
