Much ado about nothing. The Council of State cancels the obligation for petrol stations to display the average fuel price requested by the Minister of Made in Italy Adolfo Urso. The administrative magistrates have in fact annulled article 7 of the Mimit decree of 31 March 2023, which introduced the obligation for fuel distributors to display the average price.
With sentence 1806 registered today, the administrative judges partially accepted the appeal presented by Mimit after the ruling of the TAR following the request presented by Fegica and Figisc, associations that bring together petrol pump managers.
The provision states that “if the daily publication of the average price by Mimit on its institutional website seems justifiable from the perspective of transparency and knowledge for the benefit of consumers, the imposition of the display of the average price on a daily basis at the distributor is an unnecessarily disproportionate measure and afflictive towards the managers”.
The reasons of the Council of State
“The requirement” to update average prices daily “appears to be manifestly unreasonable and disproportionate”, write the administrative judges. “On the one hand, it is necessary to make information available to the individual sales points that the consumer can have, in a much more complete form given that it is also possible to know which distributor applies the lowest prices in the reference area, by connecting to the Ministry website , or by downloading apps – we read in the sentence – on the other hand, the related information costs are passed on solely to the distributors, imposing unreasonable and disproportionate burdens on them compared to the limited usefulness that the information relating to the average price, considered in itself, can have”.
“For this reason, article 7 of the ministerial decree of 31 March 2023 is illegitimate and must be annulled,” explains the Council of State. The ministry “when reissuing the power, will have to evaluate the most suitable measures to implement the provisions of the law decree without burdening the distributors with excessive and improper burdens compared to the actual usefulness of making the average regional price known to the individual distributor” concludes the judgment.
Consumers: take action on prices and excise duties
“After the ruling of the Council of State which cancels the obligation to display average prices for petrol stations, it is necessary to remit the real issues are at the center of attention linked to increases in fuel prices” declared Assoutenti, commenting on the ruling which blocks cartels with average prices at distributors.
“It is necessary to intervene to make the excise duties linked to the price of products movable fuelswith the aim of preventing the exceeding of a maximum price threshold, ed encourage informed consumer choice via an official app that indicates in real time the managers offering the cheapest petrol and diesel prices in the area. Finally, we ask for the experimentation, through the state-controlled company, of a ‘tricolor fuel which could be the driving force behind the general decline in prices at the pump” underlined the president of Assoutenti, Gabriele Melluso.