BP denies claim of gas price-fixing after 2008 hurricane A trading team at BP moved natural gas through a pipeline linking two Texas hubs to manipulate prices in the aftermath of a 2008 hurricane, a US regulator has alleged. The accusations, by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, were contained in an order recommending that the company pay $28.8m to resolve the case. BP has 30 days to contest the fine. The proposed penalty is a fraction of the billions BP has spent on claims relating to the 2010 Macondo oil spill, and less than 10 per cent of the $303m it paid in 2007 to settle charges of US propane market manipulation. However, the order adds new details to a case that the regulator first disclosed in 2011, including a transcript of a phone call discussing BP's gas trading strategy. BP denied it had manipulated gas prices, saying the case was based "on a recorded two-minute phone conversation between a BP trainee and BP natural gas trader that the regulator has taken completely out of context." The trading at the centre of the case took place between the Houston Ship Channel and Katy natural gas trading hubs in the weeks after hurricane Ike lashed the Gulf of Mexico coast in mid-September 2008. According to a Ferc report, BP's financial position was poised to be "worth millions of dollars" as the hurricane trapped supplies around Houston, boosting the value of its bearish bet on prices at the ship channel. In one alleged strategy, BP traders bought gas at nearby Katy and moved it through a BP-owned pipeline to the ship channel, in order to keep prices there suppressed, the report said. The Ferc report quotes a November 2008 call on a recorded phone line, in which a junior analyst on the Texas team discussed the strategy with a senior trader. "I realise that's not right," the analyst said, calling it "the exact same thing that we're sort of accusing" another company of doing. The senior trader cut short the analyst and later followed up in two unrecorded mobile phone conversations, the report said. After these calls, the analyst "disavowed any knowledge of improper trading by the Texas team," the Ferc report said. BP first informed shareholders of the Ferc investigation and a parallel inquiry by the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission in February 2011. The CFTC declined to comment. In 2007, the CFTC settled with BP over charges that the company cornered and manipulated propane prices in a storage and pipeline network centred in Texas.