The European Commission has launched an investigation into Hungary’s trading of carbon-dioxide quotas, an EC official told Financial Times Deutschland Online on Thursday.
Hungary’s main opposition Fidesz set up a fact-finding committee last week to determine whether the Environment Ministry has broken the law in its trading of the carbon credits. Hungary’s carbon units have turned up in trading at European carbon markets last week, causing disruption and eventually a halt in trading of the credits on two bourses.
The Environment Ministry said last Thursday it had signed a contract to sell 2 million tonnes of the country’s CO2 emissions quota in a transaction expected to bring in 4 billion forints (EUR 15m). The ministry said it sold the units to a company which then resold them to a London-based firm, and the end-user was a Japanese buyer. It is still not known however how some one thousand of Hungarian carbon units could have ended up on the Parisien Bluenext market.