Competition Council: renewable energy producers, Black sea gas producers may be exempted from the obligation to trade on the stock market

The Competition Council (CC) is ready to accept the exemption of renewable energy producers and the Black Sea gas producers from the regulation on the obligation to trade on the stock market, Bogdan Chiritoiu, CC President, said on Monday during a conference on energy, romaniajournal.ro informs.

“The problem we face in Romania is that the large energy producers are state-owned and we suspect the large state companies of corruption. From this derives the ban for these companies to conclude long term bilateral contracts , because we are reluctant on the way they would do it, what would happen with these contracts if we allow the state producers to conclude them,” Chiritoiu said.

He reminded the case of the so-called smart-guys in energy and that, after this case, the law provides that all energy producers should trade on the stock exchange.

Chiritoiu claims he would support an initiative to exempt small producers from this general rule.

“We have set this rule also for private producers. We do not succeed in separating the problem regarding the large state producers from the rest of the industry and thus we punish everyone. It seems normal to have exemptions for the smaller producers. We should look into the issue and define what small means, what capacity, in order to allow exemptions,” the CC official said.

He seemed ready to accept an exemption on the gas market too, there is an intention to force the producers to sell 70% of the output on the stock market, which would affect the projects to exploit natural gas in the Black Sea.

“If we are told the offshore investments are different than the onshore ones, I am not against setting up a new rule for the offshore exploitations,” Chiritoiu said.

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