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

Energy and Environmental Law and Policy Series

Application of Anti-manipulation Law to EU Wholesale Energy Markets and Its Interplay with EU Competition Law is the first book that specifically focuses on the legal framework established by Regulation on Wholesale Energy Markets Integrity and Transparency (REMIT). 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) REMIT, adopted to combat such market manipulation, is still lacking in significant case law to bolster its effectiveness. The extensive legal analysis that the book incorporates is fundamental in exploring the implications of anti-manipulation rules in EU wholesale energy markets.

What’s in this book:

Focusing on practices that perpetrators employ to manipulate electricity and natural gas markets, 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 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. This book focuses on the interplay between REMIT and EU competition law and evaluates factors and circumstances that determine when to enforce proceedings under both anti-manipulation and antitrust rules.

How this will help you:

As the development of a single, coherent rulebook that can be relied upon by market participant is fundamental for the functioning of EU wholesale energy markets, this book provides proposals and measures that can mitigate and resolve the legal uncertainties regarding the regulatory framework that REMIT established. 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.