Parliament approves draft law to limit mark-ups on fuel prices
The government's initiative was approved with CDS-PP, Chega and Iniciativa Liberal voting against and PSD abstaining.
The Portuguese parliament on Friday approved the draft law of the government to limit the mark-up on fuel prices and ‘failed’ the remaining proposals on energy of PCP, CDS and BE.
The government’s initiative was approved with CDS-PP, Chega and Iniciativa Liberal voting against and PSD abstaining.
In July, the government approved a draft law that will allow the executive to limit margins in the sale of fuels, if it considers they are too high “without justification”, according to the Environment Minister.
At a press conference (at the time), João Pedro Matos Fernandes said that this law, which also covers gas cylinders, would be sent to Parliament, stressing that the measure will be “limited in time”.
The aim of this draft law is to “give the government a tool so that, when margins on the sale of fuel and gas cylinders are unusually high and without justification, it can, by decree, limit those margins,” he said at the time.
“Once it [the proposed law] has been approved, the government, after hearing ERSE [the Energy Services Regulatory Authority] and the Competition Authority, may then, by law, always for limited periods of time, which I imagine to be one month, two months, administratively set the maximum margin for the sale of fuel,” Matos Fernandes said.
He recalled that this margin is “also a sum of margins that have to do with transport, with storage, with wholesale distribution, with the retail distribution itself,” and that these reference prices “continue to be calculated on a daily basis by ENSE [the National Energy Sector Authority].
The other initiatives on energy from the PCP, CDS and BE were all rejected by parliament.
The three draft laws of the PCP intended to establish an exceptional and temporary regime of maximum prices for liquid fuels, a system of maximum prices for gas and tax exemption for electricity produced by renewable energy sources, as well as other measures to counteract the inflationary escalation of the price of electricity.
The CDS, in turn, had a bill to eliminate the increase in the tax on oil products (ISP) and the Left Bloc proposed the introduction of a maximum fuel price regime and anti-speculative measures in the formation of fuel prices.
