Application of Anti-manipulation Law to EU Wholesale Energy Markets and Its Interplay with EU Competition Law

In the course of energy liberalisation, electricity and natural gas contracts have been separated from physical delivery, and these contracts are now traded as commodities in multilateral trading facilities. Although designed to render energy trading standardised and efficient, this system raises serious questions as to whether existing regulatory and antitrust provisions are sufficient to address market abuses that cause imbalances in demand and supply. The European Union’s (EU’s) Regulation on Wholesale Energy Market Integrity and Transparency (REMIT), adopted to combat such market manipulation, is still lacking in significant case law to bolster its effectiveness. Addressing this gap, this invaluable book provides the first in-depth analysis of market manipulation in the energy sector, offering a deeply informed understanding of the new anti-manipulation rules and their implementation and enforcement.

Focusing on practices that perpetrators employ to manipulate electricity and natural gas markets and the applicability of anti-manipulation rules to combat such practices, the analysis examines such issues and topics as the following:

• – factors and circumstances that determine when and what market misconduct can be subject to enforcement;
• – the European Commission’s criteria to determine whether a particular market is susceptible to regulation;
• – jurisdiction of REMIT and the Market Abuse Regulation (MAR) with respect to the prohibitions of insider trading in financial wholesale energy markets;
• – to what extent anti-manipulation rules and EU competition law may be applied concurrently; and
• – types of physical and financial instruments that market participants have employed in devising their manipulative schemes.

Because market manipulation is rather new in the EU context but has been prohibited and prosecuted under US law for over a century, much of the case law analysis is from the United States and greatly clarifies how anti-manipulation rules may be enforced. A concluding chapter offers policy recommendations to mitigate legal uncertainties arising from REMIT.

Energy market participants, such as energy producers, wholesale suppliers, traders, transmission system operators and their counsel, and legal practitioners in the field will welcome this book’s extensive legal analysis and its clear demarcation of the objectives that REMIT seeks to accomplish with respect to energy market liberalisation.