EU: More dawn raids hit oil giants in price-rigging case

The European Commission launched dawn raids of several major ethanol companies this month as part of its investigation into claims of the manipulation of the benchmark that sets the price of oil.

According to reports, the Commission searched offices last Tuesday, more than a year after it raided offices of BP, Royal Dutch Shell, Argos Energies, Abengoa and Statoil, along with industry publisher Platts. The Commission announced the latest searches on Thursday, noting that it “has concerns that price benchmarks may have been distorted through anticompetitive behavior, including through possible collusion when submitting price information to a price-reporting agency.”

Following the first dawn raids, authorities in the US and Japan similarly began inquiring into the benchmark-setting practices of oil giants. This time around, the Commission and oil companies all declined to remark on who had been searched.

Full content: Bloomberg

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