Orange with Media Services, published on Saturday, June 25, 2022 at 5:55 p.m.
The French energy industrial group did not comply with a European regulation on the transparency of the wholesale energy market.
Engie was ordered to pay 80,000 euro fine for a few tenths of a second of trading, indicates the Official Journal on Saturday June 25. This operation dates back to January 23, 2017 on the wholesale gas market.
It was the Dispute Resolution and Sanctions Committee of the Energy Regulatory Commission (CRE) that took this decision, after being seized on February 25, 2020.
As indicated in the text of the committee published in the Official Journal, “a member of the Short Term trading team used privileged information” between “06:01:08 et 06:01:17”January 23, 2017. This same member noted five purchase transactions, recorded just before the announcement of the extension of the shutdown of a production plant of the group (Combigolfe), published at 06:01:24.
What do we blame Engie for? According to a term that CRE did not use, it is a kind of insider trading, which results in particular from the oral transmission of information within the company. He is also criticized for not having installed, at that time, a technical mechanism for automatically freezing the screens of his trading teams during the dissemination, within the group, of operational information likely to have a influence on the market.
A “human error”
Engie did not dispute these transactions, which it described as “human error” committed “without any intention of disregarding the regulations”. The company stressed that the transactions carried out “had no impact on the market”. The fine imposed is also the lowest expected. She could have gone up more than 4 billion euros, equivalent to 8% of the company’s turnover excluding tax. Engie had invoked in particular the “brevity of the events” and “the absence of repeated nature of the breaches”.