ANRE fines four traders RON 537 million for wash trades (2024)
ANRE found that EFT Furnizare made six trades with Tinmar Energy, Nova Power & Gas and Freepoint Commodities Europe on OPCOM's PC-OTC platform that it classified as A-B-A wash trades, and fined all four companies a share of their turnover, RON 537,503,319.49 in total.
On this page
The decision
- Authority
- Romanian Energy Regulatory Authority (ANRE), Romania
- Decided
- 19 January 2024
- Participants
- Tinmar Energy S.A.; Nova Power & Gas S.R.L.; EFT Furnizare S.R.L.; Freepoint Commodities Europe LLP
- Commodity
- Electricity
- Market
- OPCOM centralised market for bilateral contracts with continuous double negotiation (PC-OTC)
- Conduct period
- Not stated in the release
- REMIT
- Article 5 (Market manipulation)
- Type of conduct
- Wash trades
- Penalty
- RON 537,503,319.49 in total: Tinmar RON 363,982,051.85, Nova Power & Gas RON 100,106,676.12, EFT Furnizare RON 50,497,126.22, Freepoint RON 22,917,465.30
- Status
- Appealed (ACER register, 2026-10-14)
What ANRE found
ANRE's regulatory committee unanimously approved the sanctions on 19 January 2024. ANRE's communique says the measure followed investigative work opened on a referral from OPCOM, the market operator, made through ACER's notification platform. The four companies were fined for breaching Article 5 of REMIT, the prohibition of market manipulation or attempted manipulation on wholesale energy markets, read with Article 2(2)(a)(i).
All the trades were concluded on the centralised market for bilateral electricity contracts with continuous double negotiation, the PC-OTC trading mode administered by OPCOM. ANRE found that EFT Furnizare, through six transactions with Tinmar Energy, Nova Power & Gas and Freepoint Commodities Europe, engaged in market manipulation practices. Each of the three counterparties was found to have engaged in the same practice through two transactions with EFT Furnizare. ANRE classified all of them as wash trades in the sub-category it calls A-B-A wash trades.
The penalty
The investigations were closed by four decisions of the President of ANRE, all dated 19 January 2024. Decision 80 fined EFT Furnizare RON 50,497,126.22. Decision 81 fined Freepoint Commodities Europe RON 22,917,465.30. Decision 82 fined Nova Power & Gas RON 100,106,676.12. Decision 83 fined Tinmar Energy RON 363,982,051.85. The four fines add up to the RON 537,503,319.49 stated in the communique.
ANRE describes the fines as contravention fines calculated on turnover. The communique does not state the percentage applied, the period of the trades, their volumes or prices, or the reasoning on why the trades lacked a legitimate commercial purpose. It also does not report any defence put forward by the companies. The fines are paid in full into the state budget, according to ANRE.
This account rests on ANRE's communique. The underlying four sanction decisions were not located for this review, so the release's description is the limit of the conduct and reasoning reported here.
For a surveillance function
ANRE attributes the breach to a handful of transactions per company, two for each of three counterparties and six for the fourth, not to a pattern over a long period. The communique frames the referral as coming from the exchange operator, so a firm trading bilaterally on a platform like PC-OTC should expect the platform's own monitoring to see its trades, and should be able to explain each trade with a counterparty that trades with it in both directions.
Sources
- ANRE, communique on investigation actions (Decisions 80-83), 9 February 2024 (Press release, in Romanian)
- ACER, overview of REMIT sanction decisions (ACER register)
Sources read on 27 October 2026. This page restates what the authority published and adds no finding of its own. A decision under appeal is not final, and its status may have changed since: check the source before relying on it.