EmiCert becomes the world's first accredited CBAM verifier, a week before Registry access opens

The first accredited CBAM verifier exists. EmiCert S.A., an Athens-based verification body founded in 2005, announced on September 23, 2026 that the Hellenic Accreditation System (ESYD) has accredited it for the verification of embedded emissions under the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism. In the company's own words, that makes it "the world's first accredited CBAM verifier." The announcement lands a week before accredited verifiers gain working access to the CBAM Registry, which opens September 30 at the earliest, and inside the final week of the window in which the European Commission said the first accreditations would arrive.

This site has tracked the count of accredited CBAM verifiers at zero since July. The counter now reads one, with a caveat that is part of the story: the accreditation is announced by the accredited body itself, and the Commission's official list had not been updated as of September 24, 2026.

What EmiCert announced

EmiCert announced on September 23, 2026 that ESYD has accredited it under certificate No. 874-9 for the verification of embedded emissions under CBAM, and the company states the accreditation covers all six CBAM sectors: iron and steel, aluminium, cement, fertilizers, electricity, and hydrogen. The sector-scope claim is EmiCert's own wording; the company describes itself as "the first verification body worldwide accredited specifically to perform verification under the CBAM framework with capabilities covering all six CBAM-regulated sectors."

EmiCert is not a newcomer to emissions verification. The firm has operated since 2005 as an ISO 17029-accredited validation and verification body for greenhouse gas schemes, works in 11 countries, holds leading positions in Greece, Cyprus, Bulgaria, and Ireland across the industrial, aviation, and shipping sectors, and became part of CTI Group in 2025. That profile fits the pattern this site has described for months: the first CBAM accreditations were always expected to go to bodies with existing EU ETS verification scopes, because the Commission aimed its accreditation drive squarely at them, even though CBAM accreditation is a separate accreditation granted under Delegated Regulation (EU) 2025/2551 and every candidate, however experienced, enters the pipeline as an applicant.

Kostas Antoniadis, CEO of EmiCert, framed the accreditation as the end of a long application: "This accreditation is the result of almost a year of focused technical and organizational work by our team. It enables EmiCert to apply its extensive experience in industrial emissions verification to one of the European Union's most significant new climate policy instruments." Greek trade press, including Maritimes, picked up the announcement on September 24.

The Commission's official list still shows zero

The European Commission's CBAM verification page, checked on September 24, 2026, lists no accredited CBAM verifiers and still states that "the first CBAM verifiers are expected to receive CBAM accreditation around September 2026." Both facts stand at once: a national accreditation body's client announces an accreditation, and the Commission's official list, which the Commission has said will be published on that page once the first accreditations are granted, has not yet recorded it. The Commission has not confirmed the accreditation, and nothing in this article should be read as saying it has.

The lag is structural rather than suspicious. The accreditation decision belongs to ESYD alone; the Commission's page aggregates what 24 national accreditation bodies report, and its state-of-play table refreshes on its own schedule. The same lag shows up elsewhere in the paper trail. The Commission's September 1 state-of-play table listed ESYD among the NABs that had agreed to offer CBAM accreditation but did not yet mark it as accepting applications, three weeks before ESYD's client announced the first completed accreditation. ESYD's own online accreditation register at esydops.gr was not reachable during our check on September 24 because the site's security certificate had expired, so the certificate scope could not be independently inspected there. Until the Commission's list or ESYD's register shows the entry, the accurate description is: announced by EmiCert, attributed to ESYD, not yet reflected in any official public list.

The clock that starts now

Accreditation starts a two-month clock: a CBAM verifier must register in the CBAM Registry within two months of receiving its accreditation, but not before September 1, 2026, and working Registry access for accredited verifiers opens no earlier than September 30, 2026. The registration itself runs through the two-stage procedure the Commission published on August 28: a technical access request through EU Access, reviewed by the Commission, then a registration application in the O3CI portal, decided by the national competent authority of the country of accreditation, in this case Greece. The full sequence is set out in our report on how CBAM verifier registration opened on September 1.

The table below places the announcement inside the verifier timeline.

One more obligation sits between accreditation and any verified figure: in the first year an installation is subject to verification, the verifier must complete a site visit in its first verification year, a physical inspection that Implementing Regulation (EU) 2025/2546 makes mandatory in all but extraordinary cases. An accredited verifier with no Registry access and no completed site visits still produces nothing an importer can declare.

One accredited verifier, more than 12,000 declarant applications

One accredited verifier now faces a market in which more than 12,000 EU economic operators submitted applications for authorized CBAM declarant status, per European Commission figures dated January 7, 2026. Not every declarant will commission verification, because default values remain available, but every importer who plans to declare actual emissions for 2026 needs an accredited verifier, a completed site visit, and an in-Registry verification report before September 30, 2027. A single Greek verification body, however experienced, does not change that arithmetic; it starts it.

What an importer can do today falls into three actions.

1. Ask every candidate verification body the question that now has a benchmark: has your accreditation been granted, by which NAB, and under which certificate number. EmiCert's announcement makes "we expect accreditation soon" a weaker answer than it was last week.
2. Contract early. Importers whose suppliers fall within EmiCert's claimed six-sector scope can seek an engagement now, and importers working with other candidate bodies can sign engagements conditional on accreditation, as our guide to finding a CBAM verifier sets out.
3. Close the data gap that verification will expose. A verifier checks installation-level emissions data the supplier must first produce, and the supplier data request generator builds that request in the format the methodology requires.

What no importer can do yet is obtain a usable verification report. Reports are issued inside the CBAM Registry, access opens September 30 at the earliest, and the Commission's timeline puts the first in-Registry verification reports in January 2027.

What happens next

Three confirmations are worth watching: the Commission's official list publishing its first entry, EmiCert's registration as a Registered CBAM Accredited Verifier in Greece, and the second accreditation, which decides whether September 2026 was a starting gun or an outlier. Applications are pending with NABs across the EU, including bodies such as Bureau Veritas and TÜV NORD that have described themselves as CBAM applicants, so the register is likely to fill in waves through late 2026. Our accredited CBAM verifiers tracker follows the count country by country and will record each new accreditation, starting with the moment this first one turns official.