The Federal Cartel Office is examining energy suppliers and examining investigations into pricing. “It is anything but trivial to find the black sheep among thousands of suppliers with a wide variety of tariffs. But we are making very good progress,” said Cartel Office President Andreas Mundt of the Düsseldorf “Rheinische Post” (Saturday). The background is the abuse control in the price brakes to relieve consumers.
According to the Cartel Office, a four-digit number of complaints from citizens about energy prices have been received since the end of 2022. “We have already started to implement the ban on abuse. In particular, the planning of specific investigative measures is already well advanced,” emphasized Mundt.
The price cap for electricity is 40 cents and for gas it is 12 cents per kilowatt hour. Energy customers are reimbursed for 80 percent of consumption in excess of this. According to information from consumer portals, many tariffs are above the price limit. There is a suspicion that providers have artificially increased their prices in order to benefit as much as possible from the state reimbursement. Critics had also complained that consumers had no incentive to switch suppliers with a quasi-uniform price.