Elering to Dispute Competition Authority Decision

Elering AS does not agree with the decision of the Competition Authority regarding an alleged violation of the use of insider information, and intends to dispute it in the administrative court.

Chairman of the Elering Board, Taavi Veskimägi, has said that the Competition Authority’s reasoning in the case was incompetent, that Elering does not agree with the ruling, and that Elering intends to appeal the Authority’s decision in court. “In all these years, Elering has based its actions on the same rules as all the other system operators of the countries within the Nord Pool Spot electricity exchange in the case of the public disclosure of electricity market information. Public disclosure of power cut information takes place when the control centre of the corresponding system operator has approved the outage. This is how it was done this time as well; information was disclosed by Elering’s control centre within an hour of the decision about the outage being made,” said Veskimägi.

Forwarding market notices based on the position of Competition Authority would create confusion in the future. “For example, disclosing market notices for the Estlink connections is going to be based on different principles for Elering and Fingrid, and that would create a lot of confusion on the market,” stated Veskimägi.

Competition Authority has decided not to look into an application on the same matter from August 2014, having established that there was no evidence of misdemeanour in Elering’s actions. The Competition Authority has referred to “the occurrence of new circumstances” in its resolution made on 4 November this year, but these new circumstances are not mentioned in the decision and Elering is not able to identify them.

Elering does not agree with the argument that the company did not disclose inside information on time. At the particular meeting of Elering’s management board referred to by the Competition Authority, the management board did not have access to accurate inside information as described in the REMIT rules. The electricity system control centre disclosed information about the Estlink 2 outage as soon as all necessary information had been gathered. The Competition Authority itself has acknowledged that inside information which must be disclosed may originate from several sources, as happened in the given case.