Union Registry - EFET Allowance Provision
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2007 EFET General Agreement Version 2.1(a) (Power) A Jolly Contrarian owner’s manual™
Union Registry in all its glory
Comparison See our natty emissions comparison table between the IETA, EFET and ISDA versions of emissions trading docs
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Overview
The definition of Union Registry is more or less the same in all three emissions trading documentation regimes. Compare:
ISDA: Union Registry
IETA: Union Registry
EFET: Union Registry
Summary
And to the question “why is thing called the “Union Registry” when according to the definition (in ISDA and EFETA but not IETA), it is called the “Community Registry”, in the EU ETS regulation”?
Well, it is called that no more. Until sometime around 2012 it was called, in Article 19(1) of the EU ETS the “Community Registry”. Then, we imagine, someone remembered that the European Community had, since 1993, in fact been a European Union, and decided to change it.
Changed it was: the present text calls it a “Union Registry”, so we all sort of know what the Carbon Squads mean.
The EU-sponsored system in which Allowances that parties by, sell and grant options over, are ultimately stored. This is complicated because there are (as at the time of writing) twenty-seven EU states all of whom have created their own Registries under domestic law, and not all of which are, jurisprudentially, on all fours with each other as to even fundamental things like “can you grant security over them”.
As we have remarked elsewhere, emission allowance credits are sui generis in important ways: they are not the obligations of any legal person and as such have no credit component; nor are they promises to pay or deliver anything, but rather an entitlement to be discharged from the obligation to pay something; and (unlike voluntary carbon credits) they are purely a creature of regulation: they would have no meaning, and no existence, were it not for the ongoing will of the European Union that they do. Should the Registry in which your allowances are held break down or not be operating, that can have important consequences for your obligations under Allowance transactions — as to which, see Suspension Event.
since the whole market infrastructure was invented from whole cloth when the EU ETS was introduced, there were early teething troubles, including tax fraud and just flat out thefty-fraud. These glitches have largely been ironed out now, but you will still see a lot of paranoia in legal contracts about the consequences of Allowances going “walkies”.
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- The JC’s famous Nutshell™ summary of this clause