Status: 03.06.2022 5:20 p.m
The long Pentecost weekend is just around the corner – and accordingly, fuel prices are rising again. The ADAC fears that the mineral oil companies will take advantage of the travel wave and the effect of the tank discount will fizzle out.
Drivers who just want to fill up their tanks at Pentecost should look at the gas station prices with horror. The effect of the energy tax relief that has only just come into force is gradually disappearing. Fuel prices are picking up again. On Friday afternoon, Super E10 cost a nationwide average of 1.917 euros per liter. That was 2.7 cents more than 24 hours earlier. Diesel even went up by 2.4 cents to 1.968 euros per liter and approached the threshold of two euros. The published figures are based on data from more than 14,000 petrol stations.
“It’s getting more and more expensive!”
Prices at the petrol pumps had already risen by a few cents yesterday, after falling significantly on Wednesday when the tank discount came into effect. “It’s getting more and more expensive at the moment,” said ADAC expert Christian Laberer. “This is going in the wrong direction without the oil price or the dollar exchange rate giving any reason for it.”
Oil prices have fallen since the beginning of the month. At the end of May, the price of Brent crude oil from the North Sea was still at $1.2282. Now Brent is only $1.1890. There was also no negative impact from the currency side. The dollar exchange rate has hardly moved since the beginning of the month.
The tax relief has not yet fully reached consumers. At the beginning of the month, the nationwide daily average price fell by only 27.3 cents for E10 and 11.6 cents for diesel. The tax burden on E10 is reduced by 35.2 cents per liter. For diesel it is 16.7 cents. Theoretically, the prices for E10 should be around 1.80 euros and for diesel at 1.88 euros.
“Customers feel cheated”
“You could get the impression that the mineral oil industry is using the Pentecost wave for its own purposes in order to keep prices at a high level,” says ADAC expert Laberer. The customers felt fooled, complains Thomas Mülther, regional spokesman for the ADAC North Rhine. He suspects “that the oil companies are exploiting the situation when many people go on vacation by car over Pentecost and demand is high.” Not passing on the full tank discount to consumers and now even raising the prices, which are still completely overpriced, is “a bottomless cheek”.
The ADAC experts do not consider the current increase to be justified, especially since more and more tax-reduced fuel is now arriving at the petrol stations. Overall, the prices are also clearly too high: even before the tax cut, E10 was around 20 cents too expensive – in relation to the price of oil and the dollar-euro exchange rate, says Laberer.
Economy: Oil companies could retain part of the tax cut
Economics Monika Schnitzer also expects that the mineral oil companies could make a significant profit from the tank discount. “After past experience, especially with the 2020 VAT reduction, I think the risk is high,” she told the “Augsburger Allgemeine”. “Even if more of the tax cut is passed on this time as a percentage than two years ago, the additional profit for companies due to the incomplete transfer in absolute euro amounts can still be very high.” According to their calculations, the oil companies would have withheld 40 percent of the tax cut from the VAT reduction in summer 2020, said Schnitzer, a member of the German government’s Advisory Council.
The President of the Federal Cartel Office, Andreas Mundt, wants to keep a very close eye on the oil companies, he said in the Deutschlandfunk. There is great transparency in the prices. This has the advantage “that under certain circumstances we can also ask very uncomfortable questions”. In addition, the Cartel Office wants to closely monitor developments at the refinery and wholesale level. Of course, the authority has only limited room for maneuver and cannot, for example, set prices; however, it can sanction abusive behavior.
Mundt called on drivers to compare fuel prices using a price app. “Prices often fluctuate by more than 20 cents in the same city over the course of a day. Tend to fill up in the early evening and at one of the cheaper petrol stations.”
Tax reduction is a major challenge for the oil industry
Before the start of the tank discount, the petroleum industry itself had emphasized that the tax cut would pose immense challenges for service station operators. The association Fuels and Energy (En2X) emphasized that fuels that were filled into the tanks of the petrol stations by the June 1st deadline were still subject to the normal tax rate.
Some experts believe that consumers will not fully appreciate the fuel rebate until service station operators have emptied their tanks with the fuel purchased before the tax cuts. The economist Achim Wambach expects noticeable savings for consumers as a result of the tax cut. Studies have shown that 80 percent of the VAT reduction during the Corona crisis was passed on to diesel customers and 40 percent to petrol customers, said the head of the Center for European Economic Research of the “Rheinische Post”.