Gazprom subsidiary files $472-million lawsuit against UniCredit in Russia

MOSCOW (Reuters) - RusKhimAlyans, 50%-owned by Russian gas giant Gazprom, has filed a lawsuit seeking 45.7 billion roubles ($472 million) from Italy's UniCredit, a guarantor of a project held up by EU sanctions, Russian court documents show.

The court documents were filed at the Court of Arbitration of St Petersburg and the Leningrad Region. No other details were available and UniCredit did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

RusKhimAlyans, which is building a gas complex at the Baltic port of Ust-Luga, last month filed similar suits against Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank whose next hearings are in September and October, respectively.

All three banks were among the guarantors on an engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contract signed in 2021 by German industrial gases company Linde and Turkey's Renaissance Heavy Industries with Gazprom and its partners for the Ust-Luga complex.

Linde notified the customer in May and June 2022 that it had suspended work under the contract due to European Union sanctions imposed after Russia sent its armed forces into neighbouring Ukraine.

In January, the same court ordered nearly $500 million of assets belonging to Linde to be frozen at RusKhimAlyans's request.

($1 = 96.8150 roubles)

(Reporting by Elena Fabrichnaya; Writing by Alexander Marrow; Editing by Kevin Liffey)