U.K. Carbon-Fraud Probe Poised to Run Through 2015, PwC Says

U.K. regulators may take a further two years to complete an investigation into fraud in the carbon market as it seeks data from companies including Royal Bank of Scotland Plc and CarbonDesk Group Plc.

The U.K. tax office is examining whether trading companies, motivated by transaction fees and discounted prices offered by fraudsters, continued buying and selling permits even as the doubling of volumes around June 2009 was suspicious, according to Cedric Andrew, a former investigator at HMRC, the British agency. Based on parallel cases in the mobile-phone industry, the inquiry into so-called missing-trader frauds may not be resolved until 2015, according to Jonathan Grant, a director of sustainability and climate change at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP.