Bloomberg: Natural Gas Pricing in U.K. Is No Libor as Probe Begins

The regulatory investigation into alleged manipulation in the U.K. gas market, Europe’s biggest, may fail to undermine a price-setting system that relies on daily conversations between journalists and traders.

While forcing more buying and selling onto an exchange would improve transparency, scrapping reporters’ assessments of the private over-the-counter market would increase prices for end-users, according to Englewood, Colorado-based IHS Inc., a consultant whose clients include 70 of the U.K.’s 100 biggest publicly traded companies. Whatever the merits of the probe, regulators will have “great difficulty” finding evidence of manipulation, Eddie Proffitt, chairman of the natural gas group at the U.K.’s Major Energy Users’ Council, said Nov. 14.

Five months after the Libor-fixing scandal that led to a record fine for Barclays Plc, the U.K.’s $480 billion gas market has come under the spotlight after a journalist at the ICIS price agency reported deals he suspected were being done below “prevailing” levels. European gas trading increased 83 percent in the past five years as utilities sought to cut purchases from suppliers based on oil prices, according Prospex Research Ltd., a London-based researcher.  MORE