The European Federation of Energy Traders (EFET) 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.org.
“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.
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Source: efet, June 24, 2010;