The FCA said on 18 June that it had closed its investigation into Drax after examining concerns about disclosures to the market over the sustainability of the company's Canadian biomass. The regulator said it did not find evidence that justified further action. Drax separately announced through the London market that the investigation had closed and that no action would be taken.
The legal boundary is important. The FCA said its focus was whether Drax's annual reports and accounts between 2021 and 2023 contained misleading statements or omitted information investors needed to know. It also said Drax is not a regulated financial-services firm subject to all FCA rules, but is a listed company with continuing disclosure obligations.
Drax had disclosed the investigation in its 2025 preliminary results, saying the FCA began work in August 2025 and was looking at historical statements about biomass sourcing from January 2022 to March 2024. The Guardian reported that the regulator reviewed extensive documentation and interviewed individuals at the company before closing the case.
For investors, the difference between "no further action" and "cleared on every contested question" is not semantic. A disclosure investigation asks whether market statements met the legal standard at the time they were made. It does not ask whether every future subsidy, supply-chain or carbon-accounting assumption embedded in the business model will survive political and scientific scrutiny.
That outcome gives Drax a regulatory answer on one securities-law question. It does not make the wider biomass dispute disappear. The company's 2024 annual report said Ofgem had separately closed an investigation into biomass profiling data after accepting a GBP 25mn payment into its voluntary redress fund. Ofgem found no evidence that Drax's biomass was not sustainable or that renewable certificates had been issued incorrectly, but that case concerned reporting obligations under the energy-subsidy regime, not listed-company disclosure.