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Berlin (dpa) - After years of legal dispute with the energy companies, the federal government has agreed on compensation for the accelerated nuclear phase-out.
As emerged from a joint statement by the Ministry of Environment, Finance and Economics on Friday, the groups RWE, Vattenfall, Eon / PreussenElektra and Enbw are to receive a total of 2.43 billion euros in compensation for lost profits and investments made in vain.
The “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” had already reported on the agreement on Thursday evening, but it was not officially confirmed at first.
According to the figures that have now been officially announced, Vattenfall will receive the largest part of the compensation with 1.425 billion euros.
880 million euros are earmarked for RWE, 80 million euros for EnBW, and 42.5 million euros would go to Eon / PreussenElektra.
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According to the information, all existing legal disputes would be resolved with the agreement - including the lawsuit by Vattenfall before the International Court of Arbitration of the World Bank (ICSID), with which the group originally wanted to obtain six billion euros in compensation.
With the agreement that has now been reached, a ten-year legal dispute comes to an end.
The companies' claim to compensation arose from Germany's surprising withdrawal from nuclear energy in 2011.
With the U-turn after the reactor accident in Fukushima, which will be the tenth anniversary of March 11, the federal government at the time withdrew the extension of the term that had only been decided a few months earlier and set fixed shutdown dates for the nuclear reactors.
As a result, the operators suffered damage for which there must be compensation, ruled the Federal Constitutional Court in 2016.
It was not until last year that the judges in Karlsruhe decided after a lawsuit by Vattenfall that the federal government had to completely re-regulate the basis for compensation payments - it was unreasonable.
The corporate bodies still have to approve the current agreement.
Then the key points should be anchored in a contract and transmitted to the Bundestag.
The final regulation should then come into force with a new law.
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As reported by the ministries, the payments serve on the one hand to compensate for residual amounts of electricity that companies can no longer generate due to the earlier shutdown of their systems.
That applies to RWE and Vattenfall.
On the other hand, it is a matter of compensation for investments made in vain - which concerns EnBW, Eon / PreussenElektra and RWE.
© dpa-infocom, dpa: 210305-99-700652 / 2