Gerber Group Calls on EU Commission: CBAM Certificate Rules Must Not Punish Typing Errors as Fraud
Riegel/Brussels, 6 August 2026 – The Gerber Group has submitted a detailed statement in the EU consultation on the draft Delegated Regulation on the sale and repurchase of CBAM certificates and the common central platform. The company’s central message: a typing error is not fraud, legal action is not a correction function, and a single irrevocable request per year is not simplification.
CBAM Certificates: The Background
From 1 February 2027, all authorised CBAM declarants will have to purchase their CBAM certificates via a new common central platform. The draft regulation now under consultation defines how businesses buy certificates, how they recover money for surplus certificates and how errors are handled. Under the current draft, a purchase request cannot be amended once submitted, and a repurchase request may be made only once a year and can be neither corrected nor withdrawn, not even one second after submission.
Gerber Group’s Demands
Thorsten Gerber, CEO of Gerber Group, puts it plainly in the submitted statement: “The Commission may correct its own draft. The platform operator may rectify its reports. The authorities may correct data omissions. Only the SME that pays the bill is expected to be infallible. We are not asking for preferential treatment. We are asking for the elementary right to correct an error before it turns into financial damage.”
Gerber Group demands a general right to correct obvious input errors before payment or approval, secured by a complete timestamped audit trail, monthly processing of repurchase requests within 15 calendar days, automatic deadline protection when the Commission’s own systems fail, support in the official languages of the Member States instead of an English-only helpline, and the structured involvement of importing SMEs in platform testing before the system becomes mandatory.
Criticism of the Commission
In its statement, Gerber Group points out that the consultation document itself contains placeholders, an incorrect legal reference and contradictory procedural provisions, while simultaneously denying businesses any correction mechanism. The draft also sets a platform fee of five cents per certificate, roughly sixteen times the transaction fee of the established EEX trading venue, without publishing any cost calculation. Based on current import volumes, this would generate around EUR 22 million per year.
“Brussels is not merely demanding payment. It is also charging companies for collecting it. And the Commission should know from its own experience how quickly errors creep in: it copied faulty default values from a broken Excel file and needed seven months to correct them. Yet it grants SMEs zero seconds,” said Thorsten Gerber.
What Is at Stake
If the draft is adopted unchanged, every input error becomes an immediate financial risk for importing SMEs. A misplaced digit in a certificate request can only be resolved before a national court, with legal costs that may exceed the amount in dispute. Large corporate groups with international compliance teams can absorb such risks. Small and medium sized importers, who are legally obliged to use and finance the system, cannot.
About the Gerber Group
The Gerber Group, headquartered in Riegel am Kaiserstuhl, is a mid-sized stainless steel and aluminium trader with offices in Germany, Italy, Asia and the United States. For more than 20 years, under the leadership of founder and CEO Thorsten Gerber, the company has exclusively served small and medium-sized enterprises in trade and production.
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