Fuel prices: Sébastien Lecornu “annoyed” by the posture of distributors who do not want to talk about their margins

He wants to refocus the debate. While some voices are campaigning to remove the CEE tax (also called C2E) to reduce prices at the pump, Sébastien Lecornu said he was “annoyed” this Thursday to see that distributors are not raising the possibility of limiting their own margins, in the midst of a crisis of rising fuel costs.

During a press conference after announcements on housing, in Marseille (Bouches-du-Rhône), the Prime Minister was questioned about the possible abolition of the CEE tax, a tax of 16 cents per liter of fuel used to finance energy savings certificates subsidizing energy renovation work. An idea suggested in particular by the president of the National Rally, Jordan Bardella.

“I was a little bit annoyed to see that the debate was going on” on C2E, reacted Sébastien Lecornu, who instead wants to question distributors’ margins on fuels. And the Prime Minister half-heartedly recalls that his government has worked on a decree aimed at regulating these margins.

The risk of a “social plan” in the building

“C2E is very easy to knock on because no one understands exactly how it works,” he continued. But removing these certificates means reaching “the end of the pipe”, “all French people who are engaged in renovation projects, their house, their apartment”.

“Suspending the C2E means suspending the subsidy for the French. (…) It is putting a huge social plan on all construction companies in this country,” he added.

At the same time, the Prime Minister accused the distributors of having shifted the debate so as not to talk about the margins made on the cost of fuel. “I asked the ministers to objectivize once and for all what had happened to distributors’ margins,” he declared.

“It must decrease at the pump”

“As we are in a crisis of price volatility, with inflation which is imported because there is still war (…) when it increases quickly on the markets, in particular the price of Brent and the Asian markets, it increases quickly at the pump, that, everyone is well aware of this, from Marseille to Vernon (Eure)”, explained Sébastien Lecornu.

But “when it decreases (…), it sometimes decreases less quickly at the pump”. However, the head of the executive wants to defend a rule: “When it increases overall, we understand that it increases at the pump”, but “when it decreases overall, it must decrease just as quickly at the pump”.

On this subject, Sébastien Lecornu affirmed that it was necessary to “leave room for dialogue” with distributors, with whom he admitted not being “completely in agreement on the way of seeing things with the major distributors”.