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EFET publishes the new Master DES LNG Sale and Purchase Agreement

Date

23 Jun 2010

Sections

Energy

The European Federation of Energy Traders (EFET)1 has published today a LNG DES

Master Sale and Purchase Agreement. This agreement represents an industry-wide

compromise, agreed in the Legal Task Force LNG over a period of about one year. The

participants of the EFET Legal Committee, a group with more than 40 representatives

from companies involved in energy trading, endorsed the document unanimously on 18th June 2010.

The DES Master Sale and Purchase Agreement is now ready for use as an EFET

standard document and can be downloaded from www.efet.org2.

“LNG is of increasing importance for the European gas supply, however an industrywide

standard, balanced and robust agreement for LNG spot transactions was missing.

This missing link has been filled.” said Jan Haizmann, Co-Chairman and Secretary of

the EFET Legal Committee, underlining the efficient work of the task force and the easy

readability of the document.

“The industry is ill served with existing LNG documentation offering hundreds of options

without clear structures; EFET offers an approachable and user-friendly document to the

market”, Haizmann said.

The task force manager of the EFET Legal Task Force LNG, Cristina Ludena of

Geneva-based company Vitol, played a key-role in bringing different corporate interests

together in order to offer the market a neutral standard document. “It has been

instrumental the valuable input from senior legal counsels of a diversified group of EFET

member companies participating in the task force. Our objective has been to reflect the

current industry standard in this document, so that this EFET LNG Master Agreement is

adopted by market participants in their bilateral negotiations and also serves as a

reference in general, for example, when organizing LNG public tenders in Europe. The EFET LNG Master is available in word format to give market participants the necessary flexibility to adopt it as their company standard

template” Ludena explained.

Chairman of the EFET Gas Committee, Colin Lyle, summarised the new Master LNG

agreement as “an important contribution to the future of LNG trading”, adding that “The

EFET Legal Committee has provided traders with the new standard contract that many

companies have been seeking. Everyone who wants a sustainable and balanced way

forward for LNG trading can now use this new EFET Master.”

For further information, please contact:

Ilaria Conti, EFET Communication Officer, Ilaria.Conti@efet.org

Tel: +32 485 613 773

Cristina Ludena, EFET Legal TF LNG, cfl@vitol.com

Tel +41 2232 21111

Jan Haizmann, EFET Legal Committee Co-Chairman, Haizmann@efet.org

Tel. +32 472365725