The retail margin on motor fuels, diesel and petrol, will be capped at €0.10 per litre as of October, Premier Robert Fico (Smer-SD) announced following a government session on Wednesday, adding that the government will also cut fares on second-class train tickets by 50 percent in response to rising fuel prices as of 1 October.
"I am announcing that we will cap the retail margin as of 1 October – a maximum margin of ten cents per litre will be set for fuel sales. We cannot introduce an additional special levy on refineries, since we already have one in Slovakia. The Czech Republic has just introduced a special levy. We call ours a sectoral tax, and that is already in place here," explained Fico.
The premier noted that the margin cap doesn't mean that price increases will stop if the commodity price continues to rise. "If a barrel currently costs USD 100, they want additional USD 20 or 30 as a premium. If the price rises further, this is a kind of brake to ensure that fuel retailers behave responsibly," he stressed.
Fico said that representatives of Slovnaft, which is not only a refinery but also the dominant fuel retailer in Slovakia, were also present at the government meeting. "We once again made the Slovak government's position clear – Slovakia must rank among the cheaper half of EU countries, and we are succeeding in this," he stressed.
"If we look at the countries within the European Union, they are approaching the issue of rising fuel prices in different ways. Some countries tried in the past to address it by cutting excise duty or VAT, spending hundreds of millions of euros, perhaps even billions, to no effect whatsoever. Now that all of that has been scrapped, some countries are once again turning to various measures to help prevent [fuel] prices from rising further," added the premier.
Source: TASR
