President of the CC: Renewable energy and offshore gas producers may be exempted from the obligation to sell on the stock exchange

The Competition Council is willing to accept the exemption of renewable energy and Black Sea gas producers from the stock exchange trading rule said Bogdan Chiriţoiu, the president of the institution in the Energy Transition conference in Bucharest.

"The problem that we have in Romania is that the large electricity producers are state-owned and large state-owned companies are suspect of corruption, hence the ban that these companies can make long-term bilateral contracts because we are afraid of what they would do, what would happen to these contracts if we let the big state producers complete them," Chiriţoiu said.

He mentioned that legislation obliges all energy producers to sell available electricity on the stock exchange after the scandal related to bilateral contracts with so-called "smart boys" in energy, which strongly affects producers of renewable sources, especially the small ones.

Chiriţoiu argues, however, that he would support an initiative to exempt small producers from this general rule.

"This obligation to trade on the stock exchange is also imposed to private operators. We can not separate the large state producers from the rest of the industry and punish everyone with things that are not necessarily economically rational. We need to look at what small means, what capacity to make exceptions, because not everyone can trade on the stock exchange and have a trading department"said the Competition Council official.

He also said he is willing to accept an exception on the gas market, where there is also an intention to force producers to sell 70% of the output on the stock exchange, which would affect the offshore Black Sea exploration and extraction projects.

"I also do not oppose the idea of making exceptions for renewable investments, as I said we agree with offshore gas exemptions, if we are told that offshore investments are of a different nature than onshore, I do not have nothing to create a special rule for offshore ... Wherever we do not have big state-owned companies, we need to show flexibility. On the other hand, rightly, we still do not have enough confidence in the quality of governance in the big state-owned companies to let them free to behave like any actor on the market, "Chiriţoiu continued.