Case
On 27 July 2018, the Energy Community Secretariat sent an Opening Letter to the Republic of Serbia in accordance with the Rules of Procedure for Dispute Settlement. The Secretariat, takes the preliminary view that excluding interconnection point Horgoš from allocation of capacity is not compliant with the Energy Community acquis communautiare related to ensuring non-discriminatory third party access. The Republic of Serbia has been given the possibility until 8 October 2018 to comply of its own accord with the requirements of the Treaty, or to justify its position.
Reasoning
The Republic of Serbia is under an obligation to ensure unrestricted third party access regime and to apply open capacity-allocation procedure on a non-discriminatory basis.
The view that the Secretariat takes in the Opening Letter is that due to unjustified exclusion of the Horgoš entry point, i.e. a single cross-border entry point to the natural gas transmission system of the Republic of Serbia, from unrestricted third party access regime and from open capacity-allocation procedure as well as due to the failure to address discriminatory and anticompetitive market conduct of Srbijagas as regards allocation of cross-border transmission capacities, the Republic of Serbia is in breach of Article 32 of Directive 2009/73/EC and Article 16 of Regulation (EC) 715/2009 and, therefore, failed to fulfil its obligations under Articles 6, 10 and 11 of the Treaty.
Procedure
Given the importance of cross-border capacity allocation for the establishment of an internal natural gas market as pursued by the Energy Community Treaty, the Secretariat decided to initiate the present proceedings under Article 90 of the Treaty upon a complaint. The purpose of this initial step in the procedure is to give the Republic of Serbia the possibility to react to the allegation of non-compliance with Energy Community law, and enabling the Secretariat to establish the full factual and legal background of the case.
According to Articles 7 and 17 of the Rules of Procedure for Dispute Settlement, interested parties may be granted access to the case file and may submit written observations on the present case to the Secretariat during the preliminary procedure.