French gas and power group Engie plans to cut about 1,150 jobs in various support functions and the firm’s Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) business is set to book a full-year loss after making losses in the first half, L’Expansion said.

The newsletter reported that Engie planned to cut 20 per cent of its support functions in France, including 600 jobs at its call centres, 250 sales positions, 200 IT positions and possibly about 100 jobs in its trading division. An Engie spokeswoman declined to comment.

The LNG industry in Europe is suffering due to low gas prices and overcapacity in LNG terminals.

In June, the French CGT labour union said that almost 10,000 jobs were at risk at Engie over the next three years due to the utility’s cost-cutting plans, which Engie has denied.

At the end of last year, Engie employed 155,000 staff globally, of which 74,000 are in France.

The company said at the start of the year that it wanted to cut costs by €1 billion by 2018.

Luxembourg and French power group

EU antitrust regulators yesterday opened a probe into tax deals granted by Luxembourg to French electric utility company Engie, which they consider to have given the company an unfair advantage over others.

The European Commission said it had concerns that the tax rulings granted by Luxembourg since 2008 appeared to treat the same financial transaction as both debt and equity, leading to double non-taxation of companies in the GDF Suez group, as Engie was formerly known.

“Financial transactions can be taxed differently depending on the type of transaction, equity or debt – but a single company cannot have the best of two worlds for one and the same transaction,” Margrethe Vestager, EU Competition Commissioner, said in a statement.

The financial transactions are loans granted in 2009 and 2011 between four companies in the GDF Suez group that can be converted into equity and bear zero interest for the lender.

“The final result seems to be that a significant proportion of the profits recorded by GDF Suez in Luxembourg through the two arrangements are not taxed at all,” the Commission said.

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