PostedSeptember 13, 2022, 12:32
Greater region/GermanyDiesel cost more than 3 euros per liter in Trier, what happened?
TREVES – The German city, close to the Grand Duchy, is known for its fuel prices which are out of the ordinary. But the situation of the last two days is unprecedented.
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- Bernd Wientjes / Trier public friend
Petrol stations in Trier have never experienced such a price roller coaster. Sunday evening, the price of a liter of diesel exceeded, for the first time, the bar of 3 euros! On Monday morning it cost 2.99 euros, which is 90 cents more than at the cheapest petrol station in the Eifel. A liter of unleaded 95 cost regarding 2.91 euros in Trier, almost one euro more than the national average. Then these prices then fell rapidly during the day on Monday.
In the followingnoon, the diesel had gone back to 2.15 euros per liter on average, and the 95 to 1.94 euros. Incidentally, only the city of Trier experienced such a drop in prices within a few hours. At other gas stations in the region, prices fell only slightly, if at all. How to explain it? Asked by the Trier folk friend, a spokeswoman for the Aral group did not wish to speak on the subject and mentioned “reasons related to the rights of oil groups”. In other words, they don’t want to reveal their pricing policy.
Herbert Rabl, spokesman for the petrol station interests association, speculates that an employee who deals with prices within a group may have simply changed the prices “for fun and see how competitors would react, either by raising their prices or lowering them. The fact that fuel prices were corrected so massively lower during the day on Monday might confirm this theory.
“The prices at the pump in Trier are totally unfounded”
Herbert Rabl reminds the Trier folk friend that the service stations at their level have no influence on the prices, these being controlled by the group’s central offices. “The sharp price increases at the pumps in Trier are totally unfounded and, like everywhere else, can in no way be justified to consumers,” says Mirco Hillmann, spokesman for the German Automobile Club (Adac ), in Koblenz.
The Federal Office of Petroleum Groups had already pointed out a few days ago that fuel prices were higher than average. SPD MP for Trier, Verena Hubertz, believes that the supervisory authority has obligations to fulfill: “We have to act and that is why we are also going to revise the law, because the market no longer works properly in these places”. The price of crude oil in international markets has rather normalized, but at the same time, gasoline and diesel prices have increased by more than half. “This, as well as the enormous increase in the profits of the oil groups, highlights the windfall effects and this unfair consequence on the prices at the pump”, concludes the elected representative of the SPD.
