The Quiet Power Behind the Pump

by Michael Hollister
German version published at apolut media on June 08, 2026

5.395 words * 29 minutes readingtime
This article is also available as a Briefing – for readers who prefer a compact introduction to the topic. Reading time: approx. 10 minutes.
Who Makes the Fuel Price

While millions of motorists treat the price at the pump as a kind of force of nature – sometimes higher, sometimes lower, seemingly at the mercy of the world market – an episode has unfolded in Düsseldorf that lays bare the real question: Who sets this price, and why, of all institutions, is the very authority meant to scrutinize it forbidden from looking? On 30 April 2026, the Federal Cartel Office announced that a court had provisionally halted its most ambitious investigation to date into the wholesale fuel trade. The agency was not stopped by an oil company, but by two firms that do not even trade in fuel: the price reporting agencies Argus Media and S&P Global. They report, assess and publish the quotations that the entire market takes its bearings from. And before the Düsseldorf Higher Regional Court, they have established that they need not disclose to the Cartel Office who feeds them these prices.

This raises a question that reaches far beyond Germany: Who controls the private institutions that effectively manufacture the oil price – and what happens when the state tries to look over their shoulder? The answer Düsseldorf gives, at least for now, is sobering. The decisive stage of price formation lies in the half-shadow between private business and public function – and it defends that half-shadow with an argument one would least expect there: freedom of the press. It is the quiet power behind the pump, and it has won the first round.

It is worth taking this case seriously, precisely because at first glance it looks technical. Behind the statutory paragraphs hides a question of power that concerns everyone who fills up, heats their home, or buys goods whose transport hangs on the price of diesel. And it hides well: no spectacular scandal, no confessing corporate bosses, just an interim ruling, a handful of case numbers, and one term – source protection – that here takes on a meaning its inventors could hardly have foreseen.

From the Borehole to the Court Order

The matter begins not with the court, but with a stocktaking. On 19 February 2025, the Federal Cartel Office concluded its sector inquiry into refineries and the wholesale fuel trade. The findings provided initial indications that the price reporting agencies used in the wholesale trade carry a competitive risk: they supply market participants with highly detailed, up-to-the-day information about one another’s conduct. Where everyone knows in near real time on what terms the competition is closing deals, competition can grow sluggish – and the danger increases that individual players will deliberately push the quotations in their direction.

The logic behind this is subtler than a classic cartel. It requires no agreement over the telephone, no secret arrangement. It is enough that all parties involved possess the same, very precise information about each other’s transactions. In such an environment, everyone orients themselves toward the observable behaviour of the competition, without seeking the price war that characterizes functioning competition. It is precisely this tacit parallelism – economists speak of collusive alignment – that classic antitrust law can barely grasp. It was the reason the legislature created a structural instrument in the first place.

In early March 2025, the agency drew the consequence from the sector inquiry and opened formal proceedings. It was the very first application of an instrument the legislature had created in 2023: Section 32f(3) of the Act against Restraints of Competition (GWB). The provision was conceived as an answer to an old dilemma of antitrust law. Classic competition oversight presupposes a legal violation – a prohibited agreement, an abuse of market power. In heavily concentrated markets, however, competition can be permanently impaired even when no single company is guilty of anything: the structure itself generates the problem. This is exactly where Section 32f comes in. The agency may intervene to remedy a significant, continuing disturbance of competition across an entire sector – without having to prove a concrete violation against any single party. It is a surgical instrument for sick market structures.

Anyone applying such an instrument needs one thing above all: information about how that structure works. In May 2025, the agency therefore issued information orders against Argus Media and S&P Global. It wanted to understand how the quotations come about, who feeds them, and what role they play in the fabric of the wholesale trade. Among other things, the orders demanded data that would allow conclusions to be drawn about the reporting market participants – that is, which company, in which role, whether as buyer, seller or intermediary, had reported which prices.

At this point, and only here, the Iran war enters the stage. Under the impression of the market dislocations the war triggered on energy markets, the German Bundestag passed what is known as the Fuel Measures Package. It tightened Section 32f(3) GWB as of 1 April 2026: the previously two-stage procedure became a single-stage one – an acceleration step meant to allow the agency to act more quickly. In the same package, the legislature created a second, separate instrument with Section 29a GWB. The chain is thus precise: the war triggers market dislocations, the legislature responds with tougher antitrust law, and the first proceeding running on this basis is stopped by the court a few weeks later. Anyone who speaks of an “antitrust proceeding over Iran” is taking a shortcut; the Iran war is the hinge, not the door.

For on 5 May 2026, the 1st Cartel Senate of the Düsseldorf Higher Regional Court ruled in expedited proceedings and ordered the suspensive effect of the complaints, insofar as they were directed against the disclosure of identifying details about the informants. Federal Cartel Office President Andreas Mundt said he was “very surprised” and immediately lodged an appeal with the Federal Court of Justice. The wholesale fuel trade, Mundt said, was the decisive stage in the value chain “from the borehole to the pump.” Without the information from the price reporting agencies, however, the proceeding could not be continued. Given the court’s fundamental doubts, the agency announced it would suspend the Section 32f track until the Federal Court of Justice had provided clarity.

The Machine Behind the Price

To understand what was really halted here, one must grasp what Argus Media and S&P Global actually do. Neither is an oil company, a refinery, or a trader. They are private price reporting agencies – PRAs in the international jargon. Argus Media is a privately held British company; S&P Global is a US data and analytics group that owns the venerable quotation brand Platts. Their business consists of collecting, assessing and publishing prices. What sounds harmlessly like market observation is in truth the nervous system of the global oil trade.

The process by which such quotations come about has remained astonishingly analogue. Market participants – traders, producers, refineries – report their transactions and bids to the agencies. The agencies’ editors verify these submissions and condense them, often within a short daily window, into a single number: the quotation. At Platts, this window is traditionally called Market-on-Close. In these few minutes it is decided which price ultimately counts as the authoritative one. The model rests entirely on voluntary and confidential reporting. No one is compelled to report their deals; in return, the agencies guarantee their reporters confidentiality. It is precisely this relationship of trust that was at issue before the Higher Regional Court.

The very construction reveals the weak point. When a reference price emerges from the submissions of fewer players trading within a narrow time window, then any one of them who deliberately closes deals or reports on certain terms can pull the quotation in one direction. The thinner the trading in the decisive window, the greater the leverage. It is the same vulnerability that once before brought down a global reference value elsewhere – more on that later. For competition at downstream stages, the effect is twofold: the quotation gives all parties a common signal against which they align their prices, and it simultaneously makes the competition’s behaviour visible. Both can dampen the incentive to undercut one another.

The leverage of these numbers is enormous. The PRAs’ quotations not only price individual deliveries but serve as a reference for physical supply contracts and for financial contracts worth trillions. According to common industry estimates, the price of around 70 percent of internationally traded crude oil hangs on the most important crude quotation, the North Sea marker Brent. Anyone who shifts these reference values even slightly moves values of a magnitude no single market participant could generate on its own. Years ago the European Commission already warned that even small distortions of a quotation can have enormous effects on the prices of crude oil, petroleum products and fuels – ultimately at the expense of consumers.

For the German market, this mechanism is no distant phenomenon. The wholesale trade in petrol and diesel takes its bearings largely from the product quotations for the Amsterdam-Rotterdam-Antwerp region, the trading hub of north-western Europe. What is published there as the quotation for diesel or petrol flows, via supply contracts that align with exactly these values, all the way into the purchase prices of filling stations. Between the figure assessed by an agency and the amount on the display board lie, in the end, only taxes, logistics and margin. The quotation is thus no abstract exchange signal, but the starting value of a chain at whose end stands the consumer.

Added to this is the market structure of the agencies themselves. Worldwide, only a few agencies share the business of the authoritative energy quotations; Argus and Platts are among the most significant. This concentration lends their assessments an authority that is rarely questioned, because there are scarcely any alternatives. Anyone who wants to play in the oil trade cannot get past their numbers. This creates a peculiar position of power: private companies generate a value that assumes the function of a public price, without being subject to its control. They are neither authority nor exchange, and yet their daily judgement helps determine what consumers across Europe pay.

There is also an entanglement that is rarely raised. The price reporting agencies finance themselves through subscriptions and data licences – and among their paying customers are precisely those market participants whose deals they assess. Whoever generates the quotation thus lives economically off those it judges. This need not imply misconduct; the agencies rightly point to established procedures and editorial diligence. But it describes a closeness that would raise questions in any other oversight context. An authority that wants to illuminate this closeness meets, for exactly this reason, with fierce resistance: for the agencies, it is not about a single piece of information, but about protecting their entire business model.

Here lies the real finding the Düsseldorf case makes visible. Price formation in the oil market does not take place primarily on exchanges under state supervision, but in a layer of private service providers that formally only “offer news about these markets,” as the court soberly puts it. This layer is small, highly concentrated, and operates in obscurity. It stands between physical production and the final price – and it is the one the Federal Cartel Office wanted to reach when it asked about the informants. It was never about a filling station, nor about a single corporation. It was about the apparatus that produces the price in the first place.

The Precedent Almost No One Remembers

That a competition authority fails at this apparatus is no German peculiarity. It is the repetition of a pattern that already revealed itself in full clarity a good decade ago. On 14 May 2013, investigators from the European Commission moved in unannounced at several oil companies. Among those searched were BP, Royal Dutch Shell and the Norwegian state company Statoil – as well as Platts itself. The suspicion: the companies might have reported distorted prices to the price agency over many years in order to manipulate the published quotations for crude oil, petroleum products and biofuels. According to Statoil, the period under investigation reached back to 2002, the year Platts had introduced its Market-on-Close procedure in Europe.

The parallel to Düsseldorf is striking. In 2013, too, it was not about simple agreements between two competitors, but about the question of whether the voluntary reporting of prices to a private agency can be misused to shift a global reference value. The Commission expressly warned that even slight distortions could ultimately influence the price at the pump. It also examined whether the companies had prevented other market participants from taking part in the price formation process – that is, whether the club of reporters was deliberately kept small.

Observers at the time compared the matter with the Libor scandal that had shaken the financial world shortly before. With Libor, banks had influenced a central interest reference value by manipulating their self-reported figures – exactly the same vulnerability of a benchmark resting on voluntary self-disclosure. The decisive difference lies in the consequences. After the scandal, Libor was fundamentally reformed, based more heavily on actual transactions, and placed under strict supervision. The oil quotations, by contrast, remained largely in private self-administration. The lesson learned from the one scandal was never consistently transferred to the other domain.

The legal and political outrage of 2013 was considerable. A trading firm in Chicago filed a class action against BP, Shell and Statoil, arguing that a large part of world trade is priced via the Brent quotation; in the United States, a senator called on the Justice Department to examine whether American consumers, too, had been harmed. And then – nothing happened. By December 2015, the European Commission had quietly dropped the proceeding for the crude oil sector. BP, Shell, Statoil and Platts were told they were no longer the subject of the investigation; a formal charge against the companies never materialized. All that remained was a much narrower proceeding concerning ethanol quotations, which involved other companies. More than two years of investigations against the most powerful players in the oil market ended without any tangible result.

From this a lesson can be drawn that casts the Düsseldorf case in a sharper light. The benchmark machine of the oil market has already proven itself nearly unassailable once before – not because its workings were unknown, but because the burden of proof founders on the confidentiality of the submissions and the complexity of price formation. Whoever sought the distorted reports in 2013 needed access to exactly those pieces of information that have now, in 2026, once again become the object of dispute in Düsseldorf. The question has remained the same. Only the argument with which the information is refused is a new one.

The Source-Protection Paradox

For the Düsseldorf Higher Regional Court based its decision on a notion that is at first surprising: freedom of the press. In the view of the 1st Cartel Senate, Argus Media and S&P Global enjoy press-law protection. They published information about the petroleum markets, and the market participants who report prices to them are to be treated as informants whose identity falls under source protection. In its orders, the senate held, the agency had not sufficiently justified why the names of these informants were necessary for the investigation at all. The data already available and the information provided in pseudonymized form were sufficient; moreover, the agency could also demand information directly from the companies active in the market. The compelled disclosure of the sources, therefore, would likely violate the constitutionally protected relationship of trust between press and informant. Source protection, the court held, weighed more heavily than the public interest in enforcing Section 32f.

In this way, an instrument created for investigative journalists and whistleblowers shields two commercial price reporting agencies from a competition authority. The informants whose identity remains secret are not tipsters exposing wrongdoing, but precisely those market participants whose pricing behaviour the agency wants to investigate. The protective idea is turned on its head: what is meant to protect against state arbitrariness here screens the price-formation apparatus from its own review. For the reader, this is the most piquant twist of the entire proceeding – and at the same time the point where precision matters most.

For the court’s position is not far-fetched, and it deserves a fair presentation. The business model of the price reporting agencies rests, as shown, on voluntary reporting. If the agencies had to reckon with their reporters being named on official demand, the reporting model itself could be damaged: whoever fears being exposed as a source reports less, or not at all. A central infrastructure of price formation would thereby become not more transparent, but blinder. From this perspective, the court is not defending the corporations, but the viability of an information system the market depends on. It is a serious argument, not a pretext.

At its core, then, an old constitutional question stands in new garb: Where does freedom of the press end, and where does the commercial business begin that merely avails itself of its protection? Whoever disseminates news about markets can invoke media freedom – that applies to a business desk just as much as to a data service. But a price agency’s quotation is more than news: it is itself a market instrument that contracts orient themselves toward. Whether the dissemination of such quotations enjoys the same protection as investigative reporting is anything but self-evident.

Internationally, too, this question has never really been resolved. After the manipulation scandals of the early 2010s, principles for price reporting agencies were indeed formulated that were meant to create more transparency and control. But at their core they remained voluntary and without hard enforcement. The agencies committed to procedural standards but retained sovereignty over their methodology and their sources. The Düsseldorf ruling now lends this self-administration additional constitutional weight: what the industry has until now kept to itself by sheer power of its own authority would in future also be protected by freedom of the press.

And the ruling could have effects beyond the oil market. If a commercial data service can claim the full protection of press freedom for the identity of its suppliers, then the question is close at hand of which other providers will invoke it in the same way in future. Rating agencies, index providers, financial data dealers – they all collect, assess and publish information that moves markets, and they all live off confidential sources. A broadly construed source protection for such services would fundamentally shift the boundary between protection-worthy reporting and commercial market infrastructure. What was meant as protection for the free press and its informants would then become a shield for an entire class of market-dominant information intermediaries. It is not settled that the courts will follow this path to its end; the Federal Cartel Office, with its appeal to Karlsruhe, is betting precisely that they will not. Yet the direction set by the Düsseldorf ruling reaches far beyond the fuel market.

The Federal Cartel Office therefore counters the court’s line with an equally serious view. The mere publication of price quotations is “not a journalistic activity,” the agency argues, but a commercial service that may not entrench itself behind freedom of the press. And even if an interference with press freedom were present, it would be justified by the constitutionally weighty protection of effective competition. Here two legitimate goods confront one another: the protection of information sources on the one side, the protection of functioning markets on the other. Which good prevails is not a question of morality, but a legal one – and it is exactly this that now lies with the Federal Court of Justice.

Two Tracks, One Sticking Point

At this point a distinction becomes decisive that easily blurs in public perception, but that carries the whole case. The Fuel Measures Package created not one but two separate instruments. Halted is solely the proceeding under Section 32f GWB – the structural instrument that asks about the market’s sick structure and, to that end, targets the price reporting agencies. Untouched by this, the proceeding under Section 29a GWB continues. This provision prohibits market-dominant suppliers of fuels at the refinery or wholesale level from demanding prices that exceed their costs in an inappropriate manner. Mundt made it expressly clear that the court’s decision does not affect this instrument and that the investigations based on it into pricing since the outbreak of the Iran war would be continued “with vigour.” Anyone who conflates the two tracks and claims the Cartel Office has been stopped in its entirety is wrong.

In fact, the agency has responded organizationally to the defeat. The teams formed for Section 32f and Section 29a were merged and now primarily drive forward the proceedings under Section 29a. Out of necessity comes a shift of focus: as long as the structural instrument is blocked, the agency concentrates on the abuse charge. That, however, is the harder road in legal terms. Section 29a requires proof that a market-dominant company exceeds its costs in an inappropriate manner – that is, reliable figures on costs and margins, a definition of what is “appropriate,” and attribution to a specific supplier. Where Section 32f let a sick structure suffice, Section 29a demands the hard-to-establish proof of concrete overcharging. The agency has thus retreated to the more difficult field, because the easier one is barred to it for now.

The real sticking point, however, lies deeper. The Higher Regional Court doubts not only the proportionality of the specific information orders, but whether the Federal Cartel Office may direct binding requests for information at companies in a Section 32f proceeding at all. These requests are the central investigative instrument in this type of procedure. If the Federal Court of Justice confirms the doubts, Section 32f would be practically gutted: an instrument meant to remedy structural disturbances, but lacking the tool to clear them up. Added to this is the second hurdle – the court’s assessment that the price reporting agencies, because they do not themselves trade in fuels, may not be drawn upon to remedy a disturbance even after one has been established. The agency would then face the absurd situation of having identified a structure as harmful to competition without being able to address its core.

If one asks who benefits from this constellation, the trail leads not to a conspiracy, but to the logic of the market itself. From a price formation that rests on confidential self-reporting and is now additionally shielded by the courts, it is above all the large, integrated players who profit. They are the ones who both report and trade, who have the resources to observe and play the daily quotation window, and for whom opacity is a competitive advantage over smaller market participants. Transparency benefits the weak, opacity the strong – that is not a moral but a structural statement. The authority wanted to illuminate exactly this asymmetry. That it was stopped at the threshold preserves the advantage of those who already hold the most market power.

The irony of this constellation emerges fully when one sets it beside the rest of the oversight architecture. Through the Market Transparency Unit for Fuels, the Federal Cartel Office monitors the prices of around 15,000 filling stations in near real time: every price change must be reported within five minutes, and recently the agency has also been checking compliance with the so-called noon rule, under which stations may raise their prices only once a day but lower them as often as they like. The state thus sees, down to the minute, what is happening at the pump – and at the same time a court denies it a view of the wholesale level above, where the price takes its origin. Transparency ends precisely at the threshold of the quiet power. Below, with the consumer, every movement is documented; above, where the quotation arises, protected confidentiality reigns.

Behind all of this stands a problem of reach that no court alone can solve. The Federal Cartel Office acts under German law, yet the apparatus it wants to examine is transnational. Argus Media is based in London, S&P Global in the United States, and the product quotations decisive for the German wholesale trade arise for the trading hub on the Rhine and Maas, not in a German authority. Even a victory before the Federal Court of Justice would bind only what falls under German sovereignty. The price formation of the oil market, however, knows no such boundary: it is distributed across legal spaces in which different standards apply in each case, and in which no single authority surveys the whole. A national oversight reaching for the structure of a global market necessarily grasps only a section. It is precisely this section that has now been further reduced for it – and on a reasoning that, once confirmed by the highest court, could be transferred to any comparable data service. The case is thus less a German special path than a local flare-up of a global pattern.

Three Scenarios

How things proceed is for the Federal Court of Justice to decide. Three courses are conceivable. In the first, Karlsruhe confirms the agency’s power to demand information and contradicts the Higher Regional Court’s fundamental doubts. In that case the Section 32f proceeding would be revived, the structural instrument would for the first time gain real teeth, and the case would become a precedent for future interventions in other concentrated sectors – from the food chain to energy supply. The price reporting agencies would have to prepare for their source protection ending where competition law begins, as soon as a structural disturbance is at stake. It would be the most far-reaching strengthening of German competition oversight since the instrument’s introduction.

In the second scenario, the Federal Court of Justice follows the line of the Higher Regional Court. Then Section 32f would be largely worthless as a tool against the price-formation apparatus: without binding information, the structure remains unclarifiable, and without access to the price reporting agencies, nothing can be changed at its core. Oversight of the wholesale fuel trade would shift permanently to Section 29a – the prohibition of abuse, which, however, takes hold only where excessive prices are concretely demonstrable. The structural question would remain unanswered, and the quiet power would have proven itself unassailable a second time, after 2013. For an instrument created in 2023 with great ambition, it would be a quiet death in its very first application.

The third, perhaps most likely scenario is the middle path. The Federal Court of Justice could grant the agency information rights in principle, but further restrict the identifying disclosure of the informants under the aspect of proportionality. Source protection would remain intact at its core; the agency would have to gain its findings by other means – for instance through direct requests for information to the market participants, as the Higher Regional Court itself names as an alternative. The proceeding would then not be ended, but considerably hampered and drawn out. For an instrument that was actually meant to serve acceleration, this too would be a bitter punchline – and a de facto advantage for those who profit from delay.

What all three scenarios have in common is one thing: the clarification will take time, and it will turn out to be fundamental. The Federal Court of Justice is not deliberating here about a filling station, but about the reach of a new oversight instrument and about the relationship between two fundamental rights. Until a decision falls, the wholesale level remains what it was before the proceeding: an area into which the state can see only in a limited way. For consumers, this means that the question of fair fuel prices remains open for now – not because no one is asking it, but because the answer hangs on a legal threshold.

Strategic Conclusion

On the surface, the Düsseldorf case is about a statutory paragraph, a court, and two little-known companies. In truth it lays bare an asymmetry that marks the entire energy age. The stage on which the oil price actually arises is privately organized, rests on voluntary, confidential reporting, and is dominated by a handful of globally active agencies. This stage escapes national competition oversight not through secrecy alone, but now also through a fundamental right that originally served to protect public scrutiny. Whether prices have been inappropriately high since the Iran war may be clarified by the ongoing proceeding under Section 29a. The larger question – who controls the price-formation apparatus and whether it is controllable at all – remains open.

This question has a dimension that reaches beyond competition law. Whoever controls the reference prices of a commodity controls a chokepoint of the world economy – a point at which value bundles and from which it is distributed. Energy prices are never just market data; they are an instrument of power, available to states, corporations and indeed to private quotation agencies. Anyone wishing to pursue the distributional question around oil and its prices will find the larger picture in the series “Follow the Oil.” The Düsseldorf case is one mosaic stone within it: the moment in which it becomes visible that national oversight bounces off a transnational infrastructure.

It is this question that makes the case significant beyond the day. An authority has tried, for the first time, to look behind the quiet power that stands between borehole and pump – and was halted at the threshold, with the same result as the European Commission a decade before. Whether the Federal Court of Justice opens this threshold or cements it will decide more than just the German fuel market. It will show whether the democratic constitutional state can still hold to account the institutions that produce its energy prices – or whether they have long since operated beyond its reach. The quiet power behind the pump has, for now, given the louder answer.

Michael Hollister served six years as a soldier in the German Bundeswehr (SFOR, KFOR) and looks behind the scenes of military strategies. After 14 years in the IT security field, he analyzes European militarization, Western interventionist policy and geopolitical power shifts on a primary-source basis. One focus of his work lies on the Asian region, particularly Southeast Asia, where he examines strategic dependencies, zones of influence and security architectures. Hollister combines an operational inside view with uncompromising systemic critique – beyond opinion journalism. His work appears bilingually at www.michael-hollister.com as well as in critical media across the German- and English-speaking world.

German version first published at apolut media on June 08, 2026

Michael Hollister
is a geopolitical analyst and investigative journalist. He served six years in the German military, including peacekeeping deployments in the Balkans (SFOR, KFOR), followed by 14 years in IT security management. His analysis draws on primary sources to examine European militarization, Western intervention policy, and shifting power dynamics across Asia. A particular focus of his work lies in Southeast Asia, where he investigates strategic dependencies, spheres of influence, and security architectures. Hollister combines operational insider perspective with uncompromising systemic critique – beyond opinion journalism. His work appears on his bilingual website (German/English) www.michael-hollister.com and in investigative outlets across the German-speaking world and the Anglosphere.

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© Michael Hollister – All rights reserved. Redistribution, publication or reuse of this text requires express written permission from the author. For licensing inquiries, please contact the author via www.michael-hollister.com.

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