Liguria. The war situation in Ukraine has triggered a dramatic spiral in the prices of energy products. The price of oil is constantly increasing and, consequently, the price of fuel also increases. We have to go back 10 years to find, in 2012, a price of petrol at around € 1.90 and that of diesel at around € 1.78. And there was no conflict situation or sanctions to burden the market. Excise and VAT have always made up the majority of the price, almost 60% of that paid by the consumer and one cannot pretend to ignore it. Bad trade associations of petrol station operators they feel the need to explain that, of the money of a full tank, few end up in their pockets.
“In the formation of the price at the pump there is a significant part due to taxation. On fuels in Italy there are taxes of 55.60% for gasoline and 52.00% for diesel – says Walter Vicentini, president of Figisc Confcommercio Liguria, the association of operators – in the face of this the manager continues to receive 3.5 gross cents on every liter of product placed in the motorists’ tank. Regardless of whether the price at the pump is 1 euro or 10 euro “.
“Therefore, fuel price increases for us managers do not represent an economic advantage – he continues – in fact, to purchase the same quantity of product, the manager must commit more capital with a consequential increase in costs against a margin in our favor. which remains substantially unchanged. We remind you that the retail price of fuel essentially consists of three economic components, excise duties and VAT, gross industrial revenue and margin for the operator “.
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The margin in favor of the manager is affected by the costs of transactions carried out with electronic money, costs that weigh on the last segment of the supply chain, eventually eroding about 50% of this per-liter margin.
“We managers – continues Vicentini – are the ones who lose the most: we spend more money to buy fuel and sell less at extremely higher costs. To this we must add the drop in disbursements suffered in these two years of pandemic. For many colleagues we are approaching default, this being the case we strongly fear that many of us will soon be forced to close and take the books to court “.
“In the face of this situation that pays for the absolute inability of governments that have succeeded each other over time to address the energy issue in terms of a” system “, confining the issue to residuality or using it only for” propaganda “purposes to reaffirm the ecological transition , we need a collective awareness that brings the issue of energy security back to the top of political action to avoid falling back into uncertainty, always and in any case. For families, for industry and for the service sector ”, he concludes.
The national trade unions have asked the government for urgent interventions, applying the provisions of Law 244/07, on the subject of Excise Mobilie (or anti-cyclical) which allows, on the one hand, to sterilize the VAT increases (already today greater than € 7.00 cents / lt. Compared to only two months ago) and, on the other hand, to create a minimum of stability for families and economic operators. While waiting for the required signals to arrive, in an attempt to stem the dizzying increase in costs at unchanged margins, from Monday 14 March the operators will keep the lighting of the systems off in self-service mode during the night.
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