The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) issued proposed guidance on December 4 intended to increase the transparency and bolster the integrity of voluntary carbon credits that underlie derivative contracts subject to...more
The 2022 Men’s World Cup in Qatar and the 2023 Women’s World Cup in Australia and New Zealand set new standards for sustainability, human rights, and sponsorships—and with those new standards come new challenges....more
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC or Commission) released its enforcement results for fiscal year 2023 on November 7, 2023. The CFTC’s Division of Enforcement filed 96 enforcement actions in 2023 charging a range...more
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s (CFTC’s) Division of Enforcement announced that it has established a new task force—the Environmental Fraud Task Force—to combat environmental fraud and misconduct in derivatives and...more
One week after the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s (CFTC) Whistleblower Office issued an alert seeking tips on potential fraud and manipulation in the carbon markets, the CFTC chairman announced that the second...more
In recent remarks, Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) Commissioner Christy Goldsmith Romero proposed that the CFTC promote market resilience to climate-related risk by adopting an approach for...more
ESG. Net zero. Carbon sequestration. In 2023, all of these terms will continue to be widely referenced in mainstream media publications, corporate governance and shareholder materials, and regulatory filings and issuances....more
The energy industry and market participants have provided a variety of comments on what role the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) should play in the voluntary carbon markets, in response to a June 2022 request for...more
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC or the Commission) released its enforcement results for fiscal year 2022 on October 20, 2022. The enforcement results detail the 82 enforcement actions the CFTC filed in 2022 and...more
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) issued orders on September 27, 2022, filing and settling charges against various affiliates of financial institutions for failing to maintain, preserve, or produce records that...more
With the increasing focus on transitioning to clean energy and a low-carbon economy, companies continue to turn to the voluntary carbon markets, purchasing carbon credits to help decarbonize their operations and achieve their...more
With the push to transition to a low-carbon economy, carbon offsets have become an option that many have turned to in order to decarbonize and achieve their climate goals. The demand for carbon offsets is quickly increasing,...more
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) announced last week that it has obtained another admission from a trader of violations of the Commodity Exchange Act and CFTC regulations ...more
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) announced on February 22 that its Office of Enforcement would examine wholesale natural gas and electricity market activity during last week’s extreme cold weather ...more
2/24/2021
/ CFTC ,
Electricity ,
Energy Market ,
Energy Policy ,
FERC ,
Government Investigations ,
Infrastructure ,
Market Manipulation ,
Natural Gas ,
Oil & Gas ,
Price Gouging ,
Severe Weather ,
Wholesale
After severe winter weather forced Texas into experiencing power outages and rolling blackouts, there will likely be resulting federal and state investigations into the outages, federal investigations into commodity and...more
2/18/2021
/ CFTC ,
Critical Infrastructure Sectors ,
Force Majeure Clause ,
Futures ,
Government Investigations ,
Natural Gas ,
NERC ,
Oil & Gas ,
Pipelines ,
Power Grid ,
Reliability Standards ,
Severe Weather ,
Storm Damage
A natural gas trader pleaded guilty in federal district court last week to conspiring to commit commodities fraud and wire fraud in an insider trading scheme over natural gas futures. His co-conspirator had pleaded guilty...more
2/12/2021
/ Anti-Manipulation Rule ,
CFTC ,
Commodities ,
Dodd-Frank ,
Fraud ,
Futures ,
Guilty Pleas ,
Insider Trading ,
Market Manipulation ,
Natural Gas ,
Oil & Gas ,
Wire Fraud
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC or the Commission) Division of Enforcement filed the most enforcement actions in the Commission’s history in fiscal year 2020 (FY 2020). On December 2, 2020, DOE released its...more
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) recently issued an interim report by CFTC Staff on the April 2020 price collapse of the West Texas Intermediate light sweet crude oil futures contract (WTI Futures Contract)....more
12/1/2020
/ Biden Administration ,
Capital Markets ,
CFTC ,
Commodities ,
Coronavirus/COVID-19 ,
Crude Oil ,
Derivatives ,
Futures ,
Infectious Diseases ,
Infrastructure ,
Market Participants ,
Oil Prices ,
OPEC
A recent report from the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission encourages financial regulators to consider the risks climate change poses to the US financial system and includes recommendations for addressing these risks....more
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) indicated on April 24 that it is conducting a review of the $40-per-barrel plunge in the WTI crude price that occurred on April 20. The CFTC stated that it is conducting the...more
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) recently released its Annual Report on the Whistleblower Program and Customer Education Initiatives for fiscal year (FY) 2019. The report, which details the operation of the...more
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) filed and settled charges on October 24 against Upstream Energy Services LLC (Upstream Energy) for acting as an unregistered futures commission merchant. The Commission’s order...more
President Donald Trump signed a pair of executive orders on October 9 that may limit the impact of an agency’s use of informal guidance documents. The executive orders express concern that agency guidance, which includes...more
Practitioners active in derivative markets regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) are well familiar with the US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit’s proclamation in 1971 that “[t]he methods and...more
The amendments would make the CFTC’s whistleblower awards process more uniform with the SEC’s program and would enable the CFTC to bring enforcement actions against employers that retaliate against whistleblowers....more
9/6/2016
/ Anti-Retaliation Provisions ,
CFTC ,
Civil Monetary Penalty ,
Commodity Exchange Act (CEA) ,
Employer Liability Issues ,
Enforcement Actions ,
Enforcement Authority ,
Proposed Amendments ,
Retaliation ,
Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) ,
Transparency ,
Whistleblower Awards ,
Whistleblower Protection Policies ,
Whistleblowers