Proposal to limit fuel sale margins approved
The final text approved on Thursday in the speciality will now go to a vote in the parliament's plenary.
Members of the Portuguese parliament on Thursday approved a draft law that allows maximum marketing margins for simple fuels and bottled gas.
The final text of the draft bill, which amends the existing legal regime to empower the government to set maximum margins in all components of the value chains of simple petrol and diesel and bottled gas, was approved in the Environment, Energy and Spatial Planning Committee with the votes in favour of the Socialist Party (PS), the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP), People-Animals-Nature (PAN) and Joacine Katar Moreira, the vote against the CDS-People’s Part and the abstention of the Socialist Democratic Party (PSD) and the Left Bloc (BE).
The final text approved on Thursday in the speciality will now go to a vote in the parliament’s plenary.
At a press conference, João Pedro Matos Fernandes said then that this law, which also covers gas cylinders, aims to give the government a tool so that, when margins in the sale of fuel and gas cylinders are unusually high and without justification, it can limit those margins.
“Once approved [the draft law], the government, after hearing the ERSE [Energy Services Regulatory Authority] and the Competition Authority, may then 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 values “continue to be calculated daily by ENSE [the National Energy Sector Authority].
