The government may come up with a new aid package for Portuguese families and businesses to ease the burden of rising fuel prices. The guarantee was given by the Minister of Finance on Friday.
“We are currently evaluating whether we are dealing with an exceptional moment of a peak that can be quickly reversed, or whether we are dealing with a process in which the increase in fuel prices is more structural. If we conclude with the second [hipótese]we will once again present here the measures necessary to support families and businesses,” said Fernando Medina, who spoke this morning at a press conference in Lisbon, aiming to comment on the data released today by INE on public accounts.
“We have a policy on fuels where we have acted from the beginning with a significant tax reduction on fuels. Even today, fuel prices are between 0.23 cents and 0.25 cents lower than they would be if the government measures were not in force. What we did in this process of recovering the increase in fuel prices was to stop the recovery of the carbon tax that was being recovered, that process was interrupted,” Medina explained.
The Minister of Finance thus reinforced the promise made last week at the end of the meeting of European Union Finance Ministers in Santiago de Compostela, in the context of the Spanish EU Presidency. At the time, Fernando Medina said the government is monitoring fuel prices and “assuring the will to act to protect families” if “absolutely necessary.”
The ISP discount is currently in force, which corresponds to a reduction in the VAT rate from 23% to 13%, as well as a compensation, through the tax on petroleum products, of the additional VAT revenue resulting from the fuel price increase .
At the beginning of this month, the executive decided to leave the discounts on the tax on petroleum products unchanged and to suspend the update of the carbon tax.
Source: DN
