Norway’s government, which is fighting a lawsuit from international investors over gas pipeline tariff cuts, criticized plaintiffs including Allianz SE for running up court fees of almost $11 million.

Fees in the case that ended in court last month, including lawyer and expert-witness costs, reached 89 million kroner ($11 million), of which 65 million kroner are attributable to the four plaintiffs, the government’s lawyers said in a June 26 letter to the Oslo court obtained by Bloomberg. The government urged the court not to order it to cover the plaintiffs’ costs if it loses the court battle.

“Even if this case is important and extensive, both legally and factually, the plaintiffs have still built it in a way that goes way beyond all limits of reasonable resource use,” lawyers Christian Fredrik Michelet at Arntzen de Besche and Sondre Dyrland at Kluge, said in the letter. “The plaintiffs have forced the government to use lawyer resources on this case way beyond what the government otherwise considers as necessary and justifiable.”

The plaintiffs lawyers didn’t immediately return phone calls seeking a comment.

Companies owned by Allianz, Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund, Canadian pension funds and other international investors, sued Norway last year over surprise tariff cuts in 2013 that they say will reduce their income from gas transportation by $1.8 billion by 2028. The investors bought a 44 percent stake in Gassled, the pipeline network, in 2011 and 2012, from oil companies including state-controlled Statoil ASA.

A ruling is expected in September or October after proceedings ended June 16. The suit has developed into one of the country’s costliest cases, Rune Lium, a Soer-Troendelag District Court judge, said last month after initial estimates showed legal fees alone had reached almost 77 million kroner.

The government’s lawyers criticized the plaintiffs for requesting significant amounts of documentation of “partly marginal relevance,” inflating expenses, the letter showed. The lawyers said there was no justification for the plaintiffs’ expenses being almost three times that of the government, with billed lawyer hours reaching 19,000 hours -- more than 11 years in full-time equivalents.

Source: www.bloomberg.com

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