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A CONSUMER advocate group wants the government to
show data on oil companies’ actual inventories to ascertain the
legality of increasing pump prices.
Raul Concepcion, Consumer Oil
Price Watch (COPW) chairman, said the government needs to promote
transparency in the petroleum sector to safeguard consumers’
welfare amid increasing prices of commodities worldwide.
He said that three years
following the enactment of the Oil Deregulation Law, the Department
of Energy (DOE) secretary back then had issued a circular
“requiring oil companies to notify the DOE on the details of oil
adjustments, whether upwards or downwards at least one day in
advance.”
In light of this, he said the DOE
should open data of oil companies’ inventories so the public may
be informed if there will be impending adjustments in pump prices
because these can be used to determine whether they have
under-recoveries or over-recoveries on their oil prices.
A source at the DOE earlier said
that although the department is informed several hours before oil
companies implement price adjustments, it is not obliged to shout
this out to the public.
But Concepcion said there is a
need to institutionalize “this reporting and disclosure process”
to remedy the problem of a perceived lack of transparency from the
public on oil price adjustments.
Since increasing their fuel
prices eight times since January, oil firms have made announcements
on a number of these adjustments to media a few hours before
implementation.
“With rising oil prices,
transparency in oil price charges must be observed to the utmost,”
he said.
For the month of April, the
regional benchmark Dubai crude hit an all-time high of $109.55 per
barrel on the 23rd and has settled at an average of $102.38 per
barrel, $5.62 a barrel higher than the average price in March (see
related story in B3).
Data from the DOE’s oil
monitoring said that while some analysts blamed the continued
weakness of the American dollar as the reason behind the high oil
prices, other analysts believed that the continued tightness of the
market and more basic issue of supply keeping up with demand as the
oil price driver.
--Euan Paulo C. Añonuevo
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