FERC has turned over to two House Energy and Commerce subcommittees and the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee energy companies’ responses about their participation in Enron-style trading practices and round-trip, or “wash,” transactions, including the replies that sought confidential treatment by the Commission.

The Commission supplied the information to Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX), chairman of the House Energy and Air Quality Subcommittee; Rep. James C. Greenwood, chairman of the House Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee; and to Senate Energy Committee Chairman Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-NM) during the past week or so. In separate letters on June 13, FERC Chairman Patrick Wood asked the lawmakers not to disclose any of the information that had been filed at FERC confidentially.

Energy firms’ responses, which were delivered by FERC in boxes to the Senate Energy Committee, had been “stacked up in our office earlier in the week,” said spokesman Bill Wicker, but they have since been locked up in committee cabinets. “We’re not conducting our own investigation” into the practices of energy companies, he noted. “We’re more of a policy committee.” However, the House Oversight and Investigations’ panel may have other plans.

As the Senate Energy Committee plans its summer hearing schedule and prepares for the conference on the omnibus energy bill, “we’re looking to see if there’s anything of interest [in the documents] that the committee would like to know more about,” Wicker told NGI.

In related action Friday, a spokesman said Enron Corp. will provide FERC a review of the “round-trip” energy transactions by other companies on its EnronOnline system by the end of June, as part of the agency’s probe into sham trading practices employed during California’s power crisis in 2000 and 2001. Enron has already turned over its EnronOnline database to the regulators.

The Commission is not interested in Enron’s transactions, the company spokesman said, but rather, “other companies who may have used EnronOnline” to conduct the trades. “Everything that could meet its definition of a ‘wash’ trade” is being provided, he said. FERC has defined the trades as sales “to another company together with a simultaneous purchase of the same product at the same price.”

In May, FERC had ordered about 150 energy suppliers to submit information about their electricity and natural gas “wash” trading activities in western and Texas markets, as well as fess up about their use of questionable Enron-type trading practices. Few, if any, sellers have confessed to any wrongdoing in the energy markets. Some have conceded that they participated in trades that resemble the phony “wash” transactions, but they claimed they were used for purposes other than to pump up their revenues — such as hedging prices.

Among the companies reporting the sham wash-like transactions — but indicating that revenue and income were not inflated — were Williams Cos., Dynegy Corp., El Paso Corp., Calpine Corp. and Duke Energy Corp.

The Commission demanded the information as part of its wide-ranging investigation, which it began in February, into the manipulation of gas and power prices in western markets during the height of the California energy crisis in 2000-2001.

The agency’s action came after Reliant Resources Inc. and CMS Energy admitted to engaging in bogus trading to boost their trading volumes and revenues. Both are being formally investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC also has requested that Duke and El Paso provide more information on their trades, but so far, the agency’s inquiries into the two companies have not been upgraded to formal investigations, which would give the SEC the authority to subpoena data.

Also on Friday Avista Corp. said it had received a subpoena from the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission seeking, among other things, records related to any “round-trip” trading practices, also known as “wash” trading, that may have occurred since January 2000. Avista said it believed it was among a number of firms that have received a similar inquiry.

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