Thailand's PM Has Discovered That People Are Hoarding Oil, and He Is Not Pleased
Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul emerged from a high-level meeting on Friday with the expression of a man who has just found out that someone has been stealing from the biscuit tin — except the biscuit tin is the national fuel supply and the thieves are oil tankers deliberately loitering offshore waiting for prices to go up. The discovery of widespread oil hoarding and market manipulation has, to put it mildly, not gone down well.
The details are the sort of thing that makes you wonder whether anyone in Thailand's energy sector has even a passing acquaintance with subtlety. Oil tankers dawdling at sea to delay deliveries until retail prices climb. Fuel depots flatly refusing to release stock to petrol stations. Shipments being mysteriously rerouted off their designated paths, presumably into someone's very large and very private storage facility. One imagines the Department of Special Investigation took one look at the evidence and wondered how nobody had noticed sooner.
The numbers involved are, as they say, not insignificant. The Oil Fuel Fund — the mechanism by which the government keeps diesel prices from sending the entire country into a collective meltdown — is currently running a deficit of over 50 billion baht. Diesel subsidies alone are averaging around 17 baht per litre. That is public money, in case anyone had forgotten, and Anutin was at pains to remind everyone that it is meant to help ordinary people, not line the pockets of those with the foresight to hoard fuel like it is vintage wine.
A small army of agencies has now been assembled to investigate: the Royal Thai Police, the DSI, Customs, the Marine Department, the Thai Maritime Enforcement Command Centre, and various others whose acronyms could fill a respectable Scrabble board. Maritime tracking data will be cross-referenced with energy business records and excise data. The PM's message to those involved was delivered with all the warmth of a Bangkok taxi meter in rush hour: break the law, and you will face decisive legal action, regardless of who you are or how influential.
For Bangkok residents already wincing at the pump, the revelation that fuel prices have been artificially inflated by deliberate hoarding adds a certain piquancy to the morning commute. Whether the crackdown produces actual convictions or merely a very stern press conference remains, as ever, to be seen. But at least someone has finally noticed the tankers parked suspiciously offshore, which one supposes counts as progress.