BERLIN, June 20. /TASS/. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, while serving as finance minister, intended to make a secret deal with the United States to prevent Washington from imposing sanctions against the Nord Stream-2 gas pipeline, the newspaper Handelsblatt said with reference to the German government’s confidential papers.

According to the newspaper, they confirm that Scholz "not only approved the project, but for years actively advocated it" and "by means of a dubious deal tried to prevent the United States from sanctions against the pipeline."

"It is documented that Scholz repeatedly tried to influence the US administration under President Donald Trump <...>, primarily his counterpart, Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin, as the latter was responsible for sanctions," the newspaper writes.

In the summer of 2020, Scholz sent him a letter and offered to invest 1 billion euros from the German budget to build liquefied natural gas terminals in northern Germany.

"The condition was Washington would lift sanctions against Nord Stream 2," the article in Handelsblatt says. However, the Trump administration strongly rejected the proposal as "nonsense." The article also says that the project’s other proponents were German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Prime Minister of Mecklenburg - Western Pomerania Manuela Schwesig.

Earlier, the German daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung wrote that former Chancellor Angela Merkel and Scholz strongly supported Nord Stream 2 and defended it from criticism both at home and abroad. The newspaper had a chance to see thousands of pages of documents from Germany’s Ministry of the Economy, among them memos for the former economy and foreign minister Sigmar Gabriel, notes for Merkel, and secret embassy dispatches.

About Nord Stream 2

Nord Stream - 2 was another string of the same-name project, supposed to increase the supply of Russian gas to Europe through Germany. It was fully laid but never launched. Chancellor Olaf Scholz halted its certification on February 22, 2022, after Russia recognized the Donetsk and Lugansk people's republics.

On September 27, 2022, Nord Stream AG reported unprecedented damage caused a day earlier to three strings of the Nord Stream and Nord Stream 2 offshore pipelines. Swedish seismologists recorded two explosions on the offshore routes of the pipelines on September 26. The Russian Prosecutor General's Office launched criminal proceedings over an act of international terrorism after the gas pipelines were damaged.

After this act of sabotage in the Baltic Sea theoretically only one string of Nord Stream-2 can go operational. For now, the German regulator has no intention to certify it.