Russia's stagnating gas giant Gazprom is expanding its intelligence gathering operations

Russian dictator Vladimir Putin's former money machine, stagnating gas giant Gazprom is, assisted by a French company, building a huge data collecting center in the UK:

The marketing arm of UK-based oil and gas company Gazprom is building a new data center in Manchester, using a third-party hosting facility which will be closely aligned with another data center, already built, in London.

OAO Gazprom is one of the largest gas and energy companies in the world and the marketing arm GM&T helps to promote its energy trading and energy retail activities in the European markets in which it operators, including optimizing its energy commodity assets and downstream expansion using Gazprom’s trading network.

GM&T director of global IT Rob Pringle said the division has grown rapidly with the growth of Gazprom’s gas and power trading and retail systems. --

GM&T is working with Paris-based multinational Nextira one for its new DC2 facility which will be implemented as a dedicated suite inside a third-party facility, which with the London data center will provide disaster recovery, backup systems and services for the global operations.

Director of global IT Rob Pringle talks about the "growth of Gazprom's gas and power trading and retails systems". However, in reality the world's most corrupt and  mismanaged energy company is stagnating everywhere. The only "arm" with real growth seems to be intelligence gathering - which should make western security services worried.

This is what the Financial Times recently wrote about Gazprom:

Wherever it turns in Europe – by far the biggest contributor to its $38bn net profit last year – it faces difficulties. Often, they are the result of the US shale gas boom of the past decade that has sent shockwaves through the global energy market.

Gazprom has been forced to cut prices to its western customers and is being investigated by the EU for suspected market abuse. At home, it is facing growing competition and may lose its treasured monopoly on gas exports.

“Gazprom is a stagnating company,” says Igor Mikhailov, portfolio manager at Uralsib, a Moscow investment bank. “It’s losing market share inside Russia, its negotiating power in Europe is waning and it spends all its cash flow on big projects that don’t add value.”