Finland and Sweden on Sunday announced plans to offer billions of dollars in liquidity guarantees to power companies in their countries after Russia's Gazprom shut the Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline, deepening Europe's energy crisis, Reuters reported. Finland is aiming to offer 10 billion euros ($9.95 billion) and Sweden plans to offer 250 billion Swedish crowns ($23.2 billion) in liquidity guarantees. "This has had the ingredients for a kind of a Lehman Brothers of energy industry," Finnish Economic Affairs Minister Mika Lintila said on Sunday. When Lehman Brothers, the fourth-largest U.S. investment bank at the time, filed for bankruptcy in September 2008 with more than $600 billion in debt, it triggered the worst parts of the U.S. financial crisis. "The government's programme is a last-resort financing option for companies that would otherwise be threatened with insolvency," Finland's Prime Minister Sanna Marin told a news conference. State-controlled Finnish power company Fortum, which last week had urged Nordic regulators to take immediate action to avert defaults even among smaller players, praised the proposals made by Helsinki and Stockholm.
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