ONE of Enron’s last remaining British assets has been sold in a deal estimated to be worth more than £100m.

Teesside Gas Transportation, which owns access to a gas pipeline and marketing rights in the North Sea, has been bought by the distressed debt division of Deutsche Bank.

The pipeline handles about 12% of the UK’s gas. Enron bought the business when it acquired the Teesside gas power plant – which was recently bought by Gaz de France and Suez for €400m (£311m).

The power plant was bought by Goldman Sachs and US private-equity group Cargill shortly after Enron’s collapse in 2001. The sale of the pipeline business was handled by Price Waterhouse Coopers, Enron’s administrator, which launched an auction late last year.

The proceeds from the sale will go to Enron’s creditors.

Enron’s main UK operation was a power trading business run from a sumptuous office in the shadow of Buckingham Palace. The management spent $30m (£15m) refurbishing the building not long before the company collapsed.

Although Enron controlled more than 400 firms across Europe, the company’s European arm had only £10m in the bank and an annual wage bill of £150m at the time the administrators were appointed.

Deutsche Bank is understood to have bought the business to merge it with a gas processing plant in the area that it owns jointly with US private-equity firm Matlin Patterson. The pipeline feeds gas into the plant.

The combined operations may subsequently be sold on, according to energy industry sources. But it is expected to be run separately from Deutsche’s commodity trading operations.

Will Ainger, co-editor of energy intelligence service Sparkspread, said: “This is a good industrial fit for Deutsche because it already owns the gas processing plant in the area.”

Teesside Gas Transportation has contracts that allow it access to the 250-mile Central Area Transmission pipeline network until 2018, according to industry sources.

It also has a contract to market gas from the J-Block gas field in the North Sea.

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