The Swedish minister for energy, Mona Sahlin, has reportedly called for measures to introduce greater transparency into the country's energy market in the wake of revelations of collusion among electricity generators.
Platts quoted comments Ms Sahlin made to the Swedish broadcaster SR that, this is a market in which we already were worried that competition is insufficient and if there also exist cartels or similar behavior, then that only strengthens my conviction that we have to do something in order to improve competition and transparency on the market.
The concerns over competition in Swedish electricity come after Bjorn Karlsson, a professor of energy studies at a leading university in Sweden, said that he had seen documents from Vattenfall showing that it had withheld nuclear output in 2000 to force up wholesale prices at a time when these prices were low.
However Vattenfall has denied that it acted in conjunction with any other players to affect the price of power.
Datamonitor ranks Sweden as the third most competitive power market in Europe behind the UK and Denmark, according to its market competitive intensity index.