The Minister of Economy, Sergio Massa, in a meeting with the Secretary of Energy, Flavia Royón, the Secretary of Internal Commerce, Matías Tombolini, and the directors of the fuel companies YPF, Shell, Axion and Puma, announced the integration of the naphtha to the Fair Prices program.
It is so that the prices of the naphtha and others fuels they can only experience increases of up to 4% each month for 120 days, that is, four months. The measure would end with an increase limit of 3.5% for the month of March.
The Fair Prices program is made up of two measures. The first consists of freezing the prices of mass consumption items (cleaning products, beverages, food and personal hygiene); the second, where you enter the naphtha, allows price increases of up to 4% each month for more than 30,000 items.
The minister, in reference to the companies of fuels, explained: “We know that the participation of such important companies, central to the economic life of Argentina, is key to the economy. In addition, they are among the main investors in Argentina and we value that very much. We understand that when it comes to helping to provide peace of mind and certainty to prices for Argentine society, they are of enormous help”.
And he added that “all negotiations suppose mechanisms of tension and discussion, things that make us happy and things that don’t, but having arrived at this program with a path to give people peace of mind until March helps to calm the Argentine economy; it helps the Government to strengthen the inflation reduction path that we intend to follow and helps companies to give certainty to their entire value chain”.
Access to dollars for companies
For its part, the Government promised to guarantee access to dollars for fuel companies, mainly for the importation of lubricants. It was also said that taxes on fuel imports will be temporarily reduced so that the agribusiness sectors can be supplied.
From the Ministry of Economy, they assured that there will be no increase in internal taxes on fuels. The last increase in the aforementioned tax occurred in September and had an impact on the price of gasoline.
