Bulgaria to Set up a State-owned Oil Company
Bulgaria plans to set up a state-owned oil company, which
will manage the oil and fuel depots and also build filling stations across the
country, in order to increase competition and for fair prices for consumers, as
the Government in Sofia has announced.
These plans were revealed several days after the Bulgarian
Parliament had voted on harshening the tax controls targeting the largest oil
company in the country, Lukoil Bulgaria, controlled by the Russian energy group
Lukoil. It owns the only refinery in Bulgaria, Neftochim Bourgas, with a
capacity of 190,000 barrels per day and having a chain of 220 filling stations.
Bulgaria’s Finance Minister Vladislav Goranov said the new state-owned oil
company would boost competition and domestic fuel prices would reflect faster
the declines recorded by the oil price on the global market. “It is not a
secret that for years the retail fuel prices are a challenge for our society,”
Goranov mentioned.
In April, Bulgaria’s Competition Council opened a probe into
10 fuel retailers after prosecutors alerted it that retail fuel prices in the
country had dropped by an average of only 11% in March, when the global oil
price had plunged by about 47%. Despite numerous checks into the Neftochim
Bourgas refinery and the leading fuel retailers over the years, Bulgaria’s
Competition Council has not found any breaches of competition rules. “We do not
claim that there is something improper. We want to create more competition and
show, by entering this market, the actual price at which, with a minimum
mark-up, fuels can be sold in Bulgaria,” Goranov added.
According to the proposal of the Government in Sofia, the
new state-owned oil company will take over the state fuel depots and allow
access to them for smaller fuel distributors. The Bulgarian Finance Minister
informed that the state was planning to build several fuel depots and, if
needed, it would build up to 100 new filling stations. The first such filling
station could be ready within a year.
With closed countries, with people forced to stay at home,
with factories whose production was ceased and supplier circuits paralyzed,
managers on all continents realized that the phenomenon of globalization, based
on consumption and providers of raw materials from other continents, must be
redesigned.
In Romania we have witnessed, after 1989, various working
methods in the oil sector. The Romanian Oil Company has tried to recentralize
several branches of the former entity that operated the oil sector in Romania.
Then, after Petrom’s privatization, many services were outsourced and the
royalty remained the same, all governments that came to power delaying a
decision in this regard. We will see what the future will be. Because, isn’t it
so, the world will never be the same…
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