Nord Stream has secured 3.9 billion euros...

The funds will come from 26 banks with loan guarantees secured for 80% of the financing from the Italian and German credit agencies Sace and Hermes, the paper said.

Paul Corcoran, Nord Stream"s chief financial officer, told the paper the pipeline now had everything in place to begin construction next month.

"Three years ago we had banks very prepared to loan 1bn or 1.5bn euros and to take the underwriting risk," he said, adding that today banks had to be much more careful with the little liquidity left to them.

The 1,220 km-long (758-mile) Nord Stream pipeline will eventually pump 55 billion cubic meters of gas per year to Western Europe, bypassing traditional transit nations.

Nord Stream will have two pipelines, each with a capacity of 27.5 billion cubic meters a year, on the Baltic Sea floor stretching from Russia"s Vyborg near the Finnish border to Greifswald on Germany"s coast.

The amount of 3.9 billion euros represents 70% of the cost of the

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