Wednesday, November 19, 2008

No Fuel Subsidy

Yesterday's Shahrir's statement has proven that my earlier suspicion and contention that our retail fuel price were no longer subsidized by the government is true.

Check out today's Star newspapers or StarOnline "Government Not Paying Petrol Subsidies". At last the government finally revealed that our fuel price no longer subsidized since the global crude oil price drop below USD65/barrel. So for all that period, in actual fact we have already been paying a premium and most probably still are. Shahrir did also mentioned that the price may be cut to RM1.92 or much lower soon, therefore indicating that all this while the subsidy is either minimal or non-existent.

Quoted from The Star;
“Even with petrol retailing at RM2 per litre, we are not paying any subsidy. We have actually arrived at a time when the price can return to RM1.92,” he said.

Then what happen to the discount of 30sen, most probably also non-existent. The Government all along had given a wrong picture on the subsidy when Shahrir said;

“Earlier announcements of how much the subsidies cost us, even as recent as 2005 or 2006, always included how much we had foregone in terms of taxes.

“We have stopped doing this, however, and just focused on how much subsidy we are paying,” Shahrir said, adding that the Government was now enjoying some revenue due to the difference in the ex-refinery price and the price oil companies sold petrol to station operators." (the Star 19/11/2008)

See how lack of transparent the BN government were and still are.

As an oil producing country we should be enjoying much lower fuel price, like Brunei and the oil rich middle Eastern countries.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Agreed. The actual price for fuel now is around RM1.72, so we are now subsidizing our govt instead of other way around. Sigh.