'Commitment to fixed dollar rate resulted in higher fuel prices' - Portelli

'Miserly drop in fuel prices not enough' • Video by Ray Attard

The high prices of fuel have got nothing to do with the decreased rate of exchange between the dollar and the euro, shadow energy minister Marthese Portelli insisted.

“Yesterday, Minister Konrad Mizzi tried to blame the exchange rate for the high fuel prices, but other countries use the euro too and their fuel prices have gone down,” Portelli said.

“By saying this, Mizzi could have revealed that that the government didn’t only err in its fuel hedging agreement but in buying oil at the fixed value of the dollar.”

When asked by MaltaToday whether the Nationalist Party is against the hedging of fuel, Portelli said that hedging is a good strategy at ‘opportune moments’. 

“The government hedged fuel at the worst possible time,” she said. “Prime Ministers of other EU countries were well aware of the downwards trend in the global price of oil. Malta must have been the only EU country who hedged fuel at such a high rate.”

When asked what the government could do to reduce fuel prices immediately and substantially if it is already tied down to hedging agreements, Portelli repeated her call for Prime Minister Joseph Muscst to publish all the governments fuel hedging agreements.

Fuel prices have gone down by 4c today, but Portelli dismissed this reduction as 'miserly'.

“The government has started to succumb to the Opposition's pressure to immediately and substantially reduce fuel prices,” she said. “In a state of panic, they attempted to kill this issue by lowering fuel prices by a miserly 4c, meaning that our petrol and diesel is still the fourth most expensive in Europe.”

Referring to a recent meeting between the Opposition of the Malta Council for Economic and Social Development, Portelli said that all the social partners who attended the meeting agreed that high fuel process were harming consumers and businesses.

“The over-riding message from that meeting was that stability should never stifle competitiveness,” she said.