ARERA, the Italian energy regulator, has published a REMIT enforcement Decision against a major Italian utility for alleged breaches of Article 3 (insider trading) and Article 4 (the disclosure of inside information) in the Italian power market. The announcement may be found here. The case concerns several failures to publish inside information relating to outages at several unidentified generation units, together with related trading activity on the Italian intraday power market.
The REMIT enforcement process in Italy follows a "two-step" approach. The first step sees the regulator decide whether an incident reaches the prerequisite for the initiation of proceedings, while the second step, if proceedings are initiated, determines whether any sanctions should follow. This announcement deals with the first step of that process.
The case was initiated by ARERA on 11 July 2025, after ACER notified it of a suspected breach of Articles 3 and 4 of REMIT. ACER's concern centred on three Urgent Market Messages (UMMs) regarding the unavailability of three generation units owned by the utility, published on the GME-operated Inside Information Platform (IIP). The names of the units and the outage dates have been redacted from the Decision.
ARERA opened an investigation that included a Request for Information (RFI) to the GME, to verify both the UMM publication procedure on its IIP and the trading activity that took place on its intraday power market around the time of the outages.
ARERA also approached Terna, the Italian system operator (TSO), to establish the precise status of the availability or unavailability of the three generation units during the period in question. Two other operational platforms run by Terna proved central to the case: SC-Web and PLIF. While neither is a REMIT IIP, both capture information common to what might be published on an IIP. SC-Web allows market participants to communicate technical and operational information to Terna, including dispatch and generation availability data, while PLIF is used to exchange plant and unit-level technical availability information with market participants for system operation purposes.
The information Terna provided to ARERA revealed "significant discrepancies" between the unavailability information the utility published on the IIP for REMIT disclosure purposes and the information available on SC-Web and PLIF.
ARERA held a virtual hearing with the firm to assess its conduct and establish whether any legitimate grounds for justification existed. The firm clarified that the UMMs and the related discrepancies on the other two platforms were due to its own errors.
More significantly, the Decision appears to state that the firm clarified that the trading activity conducted before publication of the UMM on the IIP was undertaken with the aim of recouping the financial losses caused by the unexpected unavailability of its units.
Quoting ACER's REMIT Guidance, ARERA notes that it is not necessary to establish whether the transactions in question resulted in a profit, and that the prohibition on using inside information applies from the moment a market participant comes into possession of such information. An offence is therefore committed as soon as a market participant initiates a trade, including placing an order, based on that information (see paragraph 154 on page 54 of the ACER REMIT Guidance - click here).
The firm was in possession of inside information regarding the unavailability of the three unnamed generation units.
The firm failed to fulfil its obligation to publish this information in a timely, complete, accurate and correct manner, in breach of Article 4 of REMIT, having
published it more than an hour after the actual outage began; an
The Decision notes that the time limit for the adoption of the final decision is 250 days, starting from the notification of this decision, implying an approximate expected date of around late January/early February 2027. ARERA's preliminary investigation may continue in parallel for 140 days, commencing from the notification of the Decision.