After suspending it for months, the government is working once again on a draft law which imposes a new tax on fuels, in order to fund the obligatory safety reserve.
The current reserve of fuels is kept by private companies on their own. The law provides that all companies that sell fuel must have reserves for three months of sales, which in the past year was 218.000 tons. The government draft changes the scheme by passing this to the state budget.
The state agency of reserves wants to buy 200.000 tons of fuel which will be kept as reserve in deposits that will be purchased or leased by the government. The money for the fuel, deposits and administrative spending of the agency will be secured by a new fee on fuel, which will be 2 ALL per liter.
The government claims that this change will not be a new cost on citizens, since that will free the companies from another cost that they have for the reserve. But fuel merchants claim the opposite. They say that keeping the reserve is not a cost for them, because it is guaranteed by their import suppliers.
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