Days after the European regulator raided the offices of three oil giants over allegations of manipulating the oil price benchmark for over a decade, the chairman of the US Senate’s energy committee yesterday urged the country’s regulator to also launch a probe to find out whether they had manipulated fuel prices for US consumers.
Senator Ron Wyden, chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, wrote a letter to the Eric Holder, attorney general of the US Department of Justice (DoJ) to join the European investigation into whether oil companies manipulated oil prices by submitting false reports to Platts, an energy industry data service owned by New York-listed McGraw-Hill.
Early this week, the European Commission (EC) raided the offices of oil giants, including Royal Dutch Shell, BP and Statoil into whether they colluded in reporting distorted prices to a Platts to manipulate the published prices for a number of oil and biofuel products for over a decade in the over $2.5 -$3 trillion-a-year global oil market. (See: EU regulator raids oil giants over price manipulation)
“Efforts to manipulate the European oil indices, if proven, may have already impacted US consumers and businesses, because of the interrelationships among world oil markets and hedging practices,” wrote Senator Wyden in his letter.
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