In brief
- The FCA has closed its Competition Act 1998 investigation into eleven day traders suspected of sharing sensitive information and coordinating energy futures trading, accepting legally binding commitments without any finding of infringement or admission of wrongdoing.
- The commitments include restrictions on sharing trading information, mandatory competition law training and an aggregate £1 million ex gratia payment to the Crisis and Resilience Fund. They run for five years and require annual compliance statements.
- The decision marks an unusual use of commitments for suspected cartel conduct, with the FCA stating that the payment exceeds the likely statutory penalties. It does not signal a similar approach to no-admission settlements under FSMA.
Overview
On 18 September 2026, the FCA published its Decision formally closing its Competition Act 1998 investigation into eleven day traders by accepting commitments, without making any finding that the Chapter I prohibition had been infringed.
The eleven individuals were all day traders, trading energy futures – gas oil, natural gas and crude oil – largely on their own account through a trading arcade and trading group, Futures Trading Facilities Ltd.
Background
The FCA's investigation, launched in July 2023, concerned suspected conduct between 1 November 2019 and 30 May 2020. The traders were alleged to have exchanged competitively sensitive information about their trading strategies and coordinated their trading, in potential infringement of the Chapter I prohibition on anti-competitive agreements and concerted practices.
On 11 June 2026, the Parties offered commitments comprising: (i) a prohibition on sharing specified categories of trading information; (ii) an aggregate ex gratia payment of £1 million to the Crisis and Resilience Fund, a government charity; and (iii) mandatory competition law training verified by an independent trainer. The FCA consulted on its intention to accept these proposed commitments between 24 June and 14 July 2026.
The commitments run for five years from the effective date and require an annual compliance statement. They are legally binding: breach exposes the traders to a penalty or a court enforcement order. The Decision, signed jointly by the Head of Department for Competition Enforcement & Financial Analysis and the Head of Department for Retail and Regulatory Investigations, again makes clear that acceptance of the commitments involves no admission of wrongdoing by the Parties.
Comment
The final Decision is notable for several reasons.
First, the FCA has deployed a resolution mechanism it rarely uses in Competition Act cases which does not require a competition law infringement to be established or admitted. In the context of commitment decisions more generally, the mechanism is designed to change future conduct rather than to penalise past behaviour: there is no requirement for the parties to admit liability and no fine is imposed. That stands in contrast to an infringement decision which finds liability following an investigation alongside a regulatory fine, or a settlement decision where an admission of liability is required for a party to benefit from a settlement discount to the fine. The FCA’s willingness to use the softer tool in a case involving suspected hardcore cartel-type conduct, which is the most egregious form of competition law abuse, is therefore all the more remarkable particularly when considering the CMA's guidance that "the FCA is very unlikely to accept commitments in cases involving secret cartels between competitors or a serious abuse of a dominant position".
The FCA justifies its deterrence conclusion on the basis that the £1 million payment “exceeds the likely total penalty the FCA could impose on the Parties if the FCA were to find an infringement, due to the statutory cap on penalties under the Act.” That cap – 10% of turnover in the relevant business year – is designed with corporate undertakings in mind, not individual day traders running their own capital, so a contested finding would likely have produced a modest fine. The FCA has therefore effectively confirmed that the commitments route secured a larger sum than the statutory penalty regime would have allowed on an infringement finding, structured as a voluntary payment to a government hardship fund rather than a fine payable to the Treasury. We are not aware of any other instance in which a competition regulator has accepted a donation to a charity or government fund as part of a settlement, still less one where the amount of the payment exceeds the maximum statutory fine that could have been imposed. There are limited instances of redress schemes ordered by the CMA – for example, direct payments back to the NHS alongside a regulatory fine, and orders requiring AA and BSM to refund consumers for breaching consumer law – but those involved compensation to identifiable victims rather than an ex gratia payment to a third-party fund. Perhaps in this specific case the FCA recognised a potential difficulty in tracing the losses back to the energy markets and/or consumers facing fuel poverty.
Readers familiar with the FCA's disciplinary process under the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (FSMA) may be surprised that the FCA was willing to settle on a no-admissions basis; it is generally unwilling to do so in FSMA cases. However, it seems unlikely that the approach taken in this competition case will be available for FSMA breaches, and the FCA will continue to resist no-admission settlements in that context. The commitments outcome may have implications for private enforcement in view of the non-admission of liability as well as the short temporal scope of the suspected cartel of less than one year.