Prime Minister Gaston Browne Tuesday said he held a ‘very constructive engagement’ with gas station owners ending a brief closure of several gas stations across the island over profit margins.
‘They reopened their stations to facilitate the dialogue. We will be establishing an expert team, to advise the Cabinet on a possible future adjustment to their margin,’ Browne said in a statement posted on his Facebook page following the meeting.
The dealers’ demand is not new. Twenty-one operators wrote to the government in March seeking an increase in the eight per cent margin they receive on fuel sales. They say the rate has remained largely unchanged since the early 1990s despite rising wages, electricity, insurance and maintenance costs..
Earlier, Prime Minister Browne had described the decision of the gas station owners to close down their businesses as ‘bad timing’ and that the closure had come at a time when the Government has eliminated its margin to keep prices down.
‘Our government eliminated the consumption tax to keep prices down; how can anyone justify an increase in profit margin at this time, to further burden their customers, during an escalation in oil prices,’ Browne added.
Prime Minister Browne had earlier said that the government would normally collect between three and four million dollars (One EC dollar=US$0.37 cents) monthly from the West Indies Oil Company (WIOC) on an average.
‘So instead of collecting that three to four million dollars per month for the past six months, roughly EC$24 million, we now owe WIOC EC$15 million,’ he said.
Browne said that officials in the Ministry of Finance are advising that expected increases in fuel prices could be in the vicinity of EC$$3.50 cents, but that this would constitute too large an increase at the pump and that the government has agreed on a price of two dollars across the board.
‘That was too large an increase to be implemented in one fell swoop, so we settled on a smaller increase,’ Browne said, and as a result, the prices at the pump will move from the current EC$14.50 for gasoline to an estimated EC$16.50, diesel at EC$16.25 per gallon.