MOL Ready To Sell Shares In Nabucco Company -CEO

Hungarian energy group MOL Nyrt (MOL.BU) is ready to sell its share in the Nabucco natural gas pipeline's implementing company if necessary, Chief Executive Zsolt Hernadi said Thursday.

MOL announced that it would withhold funding from the project firm and Hernadi confirmed that this wouldn't change until the plans for the pipeline are revised to make it feasible.

MOL announced that it has repeatedly voiced its concerns about the Nabucco venture and its opinion that the investment hasn't been adapted to present-day conditions since its conception over 10 years ago.

Hernadi said MOL delivered a strong message through the announcement and expressed hope that it's concerns will be observed by the implementing consortium.

"There's nobody who knows what the Nabucco project is, or what it costs. As long as this is the case there's nothing to talk about," Hernadi said.

Nabucco was originally designed as a 3,300 kilometer-long pipeline project to bring Caspian gas to Austria across Turkey and most of central Europe with the aim of easing the region's dependence on Russian gas imports by opening up a "corridor" from Central Asia to the European Union.

It has yet to secure a source of natural gas while its cost estimates kept on rising.

-By Gergo Racz, Dow Jones Newswires, [phone]; [e-mail]