Delinquency rife at fuel stations
The significant distortions in the Greek fuel market lead to unfair competition and threaten the viability of healthy businesses in the sector, emphasizes the Association of Fuel Trading Companies (SEEPE).
Decent fuel station owners are leaving the market and the gas stations are being taken over by delinquent ones, emphasizes the president of the association, Yiannis Aligizakis.
The only way to deal with high delinquency is to make the inflow-outflow system work, stresses the association. This is a system that neighboring countries such as Bulgaria and Turkey installed and operated within a few months, and in Greece it has been over a decade without being completed. The SEEPE administration associates the increase in delinquency to the ceiling on the profit margins of the companies in the sector and the fuel stations.
“The ceiling, when it becomes essentially a permanent measure, creates distortions and undermines the functioning of healthy competition,” says Aligizakis. What is happening today, he says, is that either the fuel stations rest on the price set by the ceiling, which means that they do not differentiate themselves substantially, or that the offending fuel stations tempt the unsuspecting consumer with low prices.
