The Autoriteit Consument & Markt(ACM), the National Regulatory Authority of the Netherlands, has published a decision taken of non infringement of REMIT Article 5 (market manipulation prohibition) by a unnamed market participant (“Company X”). An announcement in English can be found here, and the full decision in Dutch can be found here.

The activity in question took place in July 2017 and relates to activity in the gas balancing market. During the period, an outage occurred at a storage facility causing the system to be long. Company X placed buy orders while being long which were alleged to have cause improper price movements and further undesired action by the TSO. It has been found that there is insufficient evidence to show that the activity was responsible for artificial pricing. Further details are available in the decision notice.

Peter Willis of Bird and Bird LLP has published this LinkedIn post about the decision, having represented Company X.