“The suspicion of anti-trust behavior has not been substantiated in court,” the BWB announced on Wednesday. There had already been several house searches in the industry in October 2022 due to suspicions of price fixing, customer allocation and agreements on the sale of pellets. According to its own information, the BWB had received a total of 94 complaints since February 2022, which mainly complained about massive price increases for pellets, but also difficulties in procurement. Pellet dealers sell pellets primarily to regular customers and only in exceptional cases to other customers. Furthermore, under the pretext of delivery, capacity and storage bottlenecks, delivery times are very long. “It was often suspected that there were underlying agreements between companies,” writes the BWB.
Terabytes of data seized during house searches
Based on these suspicions, the BWB seized terabytes of data during the house searches; 11,000 data sets identified as relevant and nine data copies from cell phones were examined. The whistleblower reports and submissions from complainants were also examined. Individuals were also questioned.
However, the initial suspicion of antitrust behavior in the industry could not be substantiated. “An associated (price) coordination, for example by the association itself or the companies among themselves, could not be determined. Likewise, the suspicion of exchange of competition-sensitive information in violation of antitrust law was not substantiated,” writes the authority.
Accordingly, the investigations against the companies and the proPellets association were discontinued. In order to ensure functioning competition, the association, in cooperation with the BWB, made a declaration of commitment with the aim of strengthening compliance with antitrust law.
Antitrust law training for association members
As part of the declaration, proPellets undertakes to provide antitrust law training for association members, to create a compliance guide on the subject, to set up a compliance officer, to have the general meeting accompanied by an antitrust law expert and to report annually to the BWB about the implemented and intended measures until 2026 Report compliance measures.
proPellets itself sees the discontinuation of the process as “restoring trust in the domestic energy source.” The turbulence in the energy market due to the Urkaine War triggered the price increases and not price fixing, the association said. “We are glad that the allegations are now off the table,” said Christian Rakos, Managing Director of proPellets Austria.
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