There may be a cartel collusion between petroleum product importers and the Georgian authorities, which allows them to keep prices for gasoline and diesel fuel artificially high, stated Vaso Urushadze, one of the leaders of the United National Movement (UNM). He emphasized that the goal of this could be to extract excess profits at the expense of Georgian citizens.
“On the international market, prices for petroleum products are falling. However, we see that prices at gas stations in Georgia remain unchanged. At the same time, when the cost of petroleum products rises on the global market, Georgian importing companies raise prices for both gasoline and diesel fuel the very next day.
Yet when the opposite happens and global market prices fall—including the cost of crude oil, with the price per barrel dropping by about 20% over the past month—this is in no way reflected in retail prices at gas stations in Georgia.
Companies explain this by claiming they have fuel reserves and supposedly cannot lower prices until these are sold. This is a lie. If they can raise prices quickly, they should be just as quick to lower them when global market costs drop.
They operate with massive excess profits, fleecing Georgian citizens daily and extracting extra funds from their pockets for the sake of even greater profits.
This raises the main question: is this not a cartel agreement with the authorities as part of a corrupt deal? The government remains silent. There is not a single statement, not a single question, either in the Parliament of Georgia, from the government’s economic bloc, or from the Competition Agency. Everything is limited to mere observation and superficial assessments.
This confirms that there is a cartel collusion and a corrupt deal between oil importers and the Georgian authorities, the goal of which is enrichment at the expense of the country’s citizens by maintaining inflated prices for gasoline and diesel fuel,” Vaso Urushadze stated.
