As pressure for EU sanctions against Russia's civil nuclear sector mounts, you can bet your last rouble that Rolls-Royce lobbyist Vladimir Dlouhy is urging his own government to oppose such sanctions.


Fingers in foreign pies: I work for Rolls-Royce and Rolls-Royce works for Rosatom

Last week, members of the European Parliament voted in favour of imposing sanctions on Russia’s civil nuclear sector (see here). This Thursday, an extraordinary meeting of the EU Foreign Affairs Council is to discuss the issue.

This is troubling news for the British engineering giant Rolls-Royce, which is betting heavily on Russia’s civil nuclear renaissance. Rolls-Royce has a business partnership with Rosatom, its gateway to a potential regional market made up of some 60 Soviet-era reactors, all of which would benefit from the British firm’s services. Russia claims that by 2030 it will have built 38 new reactors at home and 28 abroad. Rosatom hopes to build two of these in the Czech Republic, with the help of Rolls-Royce, which is where Vladimir Dlouhy comes in.

As readers know, Dlouhy, a former Communist, is a failed Czech politician (the party funding scandal around his person destroyed ODA) who serves his country today as the unpaid president of the Czech economic chamber. He makes money by lobbying for various foreign clients such as Rolls-Royce and Goldman Sachs, the US investment bank.

Some believe Dlouhy is being groomed to become the Czech Republic's third pro-Russian head of state after Vaclav Klaus and Milos Zeman. Maybe. But in the meantime, he is servicing his well-heeled clients, in this case a British company desperate to head off an EU initiative to sanction its nuclear business partner Rosatom.

(For a useful explanation of the US nuclear lobby’s ambivalence to sanctions targeting Rosatom, see this piece in New East Europe by Wojciech Jakobik, an energy analyst at the Jagiellonian Institute. For background into the UK nuclear lobby's ambivalence, see my posts here and here. )