China: NDRC cracks down on fuel hoarding and illegal price hikes

Shanghai – China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) announced today that six service stations around the country were found to have engaged in oil hoarding and sold fuel at illegally inflated retail prices, demonstrating the government’s latest attempts to manage the current diesel crisis.

The NDRC said that six gas stations in the provinces of Sichuan, Guizhou, Hebei, Shanxi and Hunan as well as the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region had charged RMB 0.38 to 2.22 ($0.05 to 0.30) more per liter of diesel than allowed under the government’s pricing system. As a result, local price monitoring bureaus fined the offending stations five times the additional revenues they had earned from the elevated prices. The public was also encouraged to assist with diesel price monitoring.

The move is the latest in a series of efforts undertaken by the central government to rein in living and production costs for the country’s economically vulnerable farmers and fishermen, who are already facing an inflation rate as high as 6.5 percent. The announcement came just one day after the country’s top economic planner released a circular containing various measures aimed at easing the domestic diesel shortage.

The NDRC said in the circular that it has asked the country’s two energy giants, China National Petroleum Corp. (CNPC) and China Petrochemical Corp. (Sinopec Group), to supply crude oil resources to independent refineries in the northeastern provinces of Heilongjiang, Jilin and Liaoning as well as Shandong, Shaanxi and Sichuan. Together, these provinces hold around 10 percent of the country’s total refining capacity.

INTERFAX-CHINA