The Spanish National Markets and Competititon Commission (CNMC) has officially closed its antitrust investigation into UFD Distribución Electricidad, S.A., the electricity distribution arm of Grupo Naturgy. The watchdog concluded that there was insufficient evidence to prove that the company distorted free competition through unfair, discriminatory practices.
The probe, officially designated as case S/0013/23, was initiated following a series of complaints filed by alternative independent retailers in 2023. Competitors accused UFD of giving preferential treatment to Naturgy’s own retail business while systematically mishandling technical incidents reported by rival firms. This prompted the CNMC to conduct targeted dawn raids at several Naturgy offices in April 2023 to secure evidence of potential anti-competitive behavior under Articles 2 and 3 of the Spanish Competition Act.
Upon final review, the antitrust authority determined that UFD’s technical incident management relied on objective, non-discriminatory criteria. The investigation revealed that the distributor prioritized incoming requests based on chronological order and maintained priority communication channels specifically dedicated to resolving issues for competing retailers. Because no pattern of structural discrimination could be proven, the CNMC opted to archive the case without penalties.
This dismissal operates independently from another simultaneous antitrust action involving the exact same corporate entity. In a parallel proceeding, case S/0006/23, the CNMC successfully penalized UFD with a 5.08 million euro fine for an explicit abuse of its dominant market position. The regulator explicitly clarified that archiving the unfair competition case does not contradict or weaken the validity of that prior multimillion-euro penalty. The two cases targeted fundamentally separate commercial conducts, affected different segments of the domestic power market, and were evaluated on entirely independent legal grounds.
