Court upholds €48M fine on EDP for abuse of dominant position
EDP Produção "totally disagrees" with this decision. The company will analyse "in detail" the decision taken and consider legal means to safeguard its rights.
Portugal’s competition court has upheld the decision of the competition authority (AdC), which imposed a fine of 48 million euros on EDP Produção for abuse of a dominant position, with the electricity company considering resorting to legal means.
“The competition, regulation and supervision court on Wednesday confirmed the decision of the AdC, upholding a fine of 48 million euros for EDP Produção for alleged abuse of a dominant position,” an official source at the electricity company said in a response to Lusa.
EDP Produção “totally disagrees” with this decision, as well as with the “qualification of the facts, the assessment of the evidence and the legal grounds” and reaffirms that it “always complied with the legal and contractual framework”, as well as with the competition rules.
EDP Produção will therefore analyse “in detail” the decision taken and consider legal means to safeguard its rights.
On July 6, the public prosecutor’s office asked the competition court to uphold the €48 million fine imposed on EDP Produção for abuse of a dominant position, with the company defending its acquittal “pure and simple”.
In the closing arguments of the trial of EDP Produção’s appeal against the fine imposed on it in 2019 by the competition court, the public prosecutor (MP) said she saw no reason to suspend the case for a preliminary reference to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), as admitted by judge Sérgio Sousa.
In the conviction issued by AdC, EDP Produção is accused of having, for a period of five years (from 2009 to 2013), manipulated its offer of the teleregulation service or secondary regulation band.
According to the AdC decision, with this practice, EDP Produção limited the capacity offer of its power stations that benefit from public compensation under the CMEC (Costs of Maintenance of Contractual Equilibrium) regime, reinforcing the power stations in the market regime, “in order to benefit twice, to the detriment of consumers”.
