Economics

CANCELING OF FUEL PRICE RAISING CUTS SELLERS' INCOME - EXPERT

16 july, 2018

Court verdicts on canceling the National Energy Regulatory Agency (ANRE) decisions to raise the prices on gasoline and diesel affect downward the income of automobile fuel sellers in Moldova, maintains economic expert of the Institute of Development and Social Initiatives (IDIS) "Viitorul" Veaceslav Ionita.

In his research, he said that given the fact that Moldova is monthly importing around 80 million liters of fuel, 15% of which account for gasoline and the rest - for diesel, the court decisions led to losses worth 20-40 million lei for profile economic agents.

With all this, the expert recognized that the trade margin on the market is around 30% higher than in the US.

According to him, the Government has to closely concern themselves with the ANRE activities and, what is more important, to prepare a new draft law on the petroleum market products.

"If court decisions are so insistent in declining the ANRE initiatives, this means that something is going wrong in this agency", Ionita said.

As Infotag has already reported, over the last several months, the court twice cancelled the ANRE decision on raising minimal prices on gasoline and diesel at the petition of the Ministry of Economy and the Agency for Consumer Rights. They maintain that these ANRE decisions were taken unlawfully, without consultations with the interested persons and with insufficient transparency - without public consultations or draft discussions.

ANRE states that it is calculating the prices in strict accordance with the methodology, approved by the Government in 2016. It includes international petroleum exchanges' quotes - Platts for gasoline and diesel, and Argus - for the LPG. Besides, operational costs, connected with importing operations were taken into account at calculation, including the transportation and insurance costs, as well as the excise tax on fuel, the VAT and a special trade mark-up, on the basis of revenues and profit of companies. In accordance to the methodology, the ANRE recalculates the prices once in two weeks.

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