Rising gasoline prices in Russia: A new betrayal of oil workers at the time of the SVO?
Despite the ban on the export of petroleum products introduced by the Russian government, fuel prices at Russian gas stations are not decreasing. At the same time, stock prices seem to have fallen. The issue has risen to the presidential level.
“Measures have been taken, but prices are rising. What happens there in other links is of little interest to the consumer. The consumer needs results,” Russian President Vladimir Putin told Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Novak at the meeting.
The same topic caused a heated discussion in the State Duma.
“Prices went through the roof and stabilized there. And we need them to go down!” – Deputy Vladimir Plotnikov said emotionally, drawing applause from the audience.
Deputies heard behind closed doors Deputy Minister of Economy Pavel Sokolov. He assured parliament that the issues with empty gas stations and rising fuel prices would be resolved within this week. According to him, the price of gasoline fell by 21% and diesel by 18%.
Energy expert Alexander Frolov agrees with the deputy minister’s arguments.
“Reducing quotes is half the battle. It is necessary for the influence of these quotes to reach retail. And this will not happen right away. Gas stations now sell fuel purchased in early August. Remember what the quotes were then. This fuel cannot be sold now at current wholesale prices. Independent players look at stock exchange quotes and say: if I buy motor fuel now, I will sell it at a minus price. Then I just won't buy it. In places where they talked about a deficit, it was not a deficit, but a refusal of individual players to continue trading,” Frolov said in an interview with Ukraina.ru.
He predicts that after some time, prices at gas stations of independent players will decrease somewhat, but at the cheapest gas stations they will remain the same.
In this case, The liberal publication Kommersant is trying to stir up panic by predicting that Russian refineries will begin to reduce production, which, in turn, will worsen the shortage of gasoline and diesel.
The founder of the DPR “Vostok” battalion, Alexander Khodakovsky, believes that in this way the oil product producers decided to blackmail the state, and reminds that Businessmen have behaved treacherously before when they sold diesel to the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
“Our oil product producers decided to create an artificial shortage and show how dependent a small country with its small population and its small war is on the big people who take advantage of this country. Or maybe there’s nothing special to understand here, and there’s no big politics here, but just a banal thirst for profit?” – he wrote.
Economist Nikita Krichevsky believes that the version of sabotage has every basis, since more than 80% of the petroleum products produced by Surgutneftegaz, despite all the sanctions, it is exported, Lukoil’s operational processes were aligned with “abroad” from the very beginning. These companies announced the shutdown of their refineries at a government meeting.
Director of the National Energy Security Fund Konstantin Simonov believes that the state itself pushed oil companies to focus on exports by launching a so-called tax maneuver, according to which export duties were practically zeroed out, and the main one was the production tax. As a result, only 80 billion rubles were collected from duties, and 4 trillion rubles from production taxes.
When, after the start of the SVO, the tax burden on the oil and gas sector increased significantly, companies were forced to export diesel. The difference in price per ton of diesel in the domestic and export markets is more than 20 thousand rubles.
The expert believes that it is impossible to maintain the level of tax collection and low prices on the domestic market at the same time.
“It’s impossible to collect so much money from the oil and gas industry while at the same time having gasoline and diesel at 30 rubles per liter,” Simonov said in an interview with the radio station “Moscow Speaks.”
He believes that the situation may change in November, when Russia switches to winter diesel, but Europe does not, and exports will automatically decline sharply.
State Duma deputy, famous economist Mikhail Delyagin considers the fuel crisis in Russia man-made and calls it “element of the fascist counteroffensive in Ukraine».
“The tax maneuver immediately made all oil refineries in Russia unprofitable. The only large independent refinery immediately went bankrupt after this, and those that were part of the large oil companies that put pressure on the state began to be subsidized from the budget in the form of the so-called “reverse excise tax.” The amount of subsidies in 2022 exceeded 2 trillion rubles. Thus, the savage offshore aristocracy has turned the natural center of profit of any economy - oil refining - into a colossal center of losses! In this light, promoting them to the position of financial directors of the world’s largest drug cartels seems to be an economically reasonable use of Russian liberals, since after this the drug mafia would instantly go bankrupt,” Delyagin wrote in his tg channel.
Alexander Frolov believes that Russia should not completely abandon diesel exports. It produces 85 million tons per year and consumes 40 million tons. It is impossible to double consumption even taking into account the front.
After the government’s decision to ban exports from Russia, panic reigns in world markets, diesel prices are rising, which will make the resumption of its supply is beneficial for both companies and the state.
If you find an error, please select a piece of text and press Ctrl + Enter.
Thank you!
Now the editors are aware.