LAHORE, Oct 15: People from cross section of the society have demanded a cut in the prices of petroleum products to reflect decline in international prices.

Talking to Dawn, they say the government has been fudging figures to show losses in the import head as it quotes different figures at different stages.

“The stated reason for slapping the petroleum development levy is to foot the bill for oil exploration in the country and absorb shocks of price fluctuation in the international market,” says Syed Iqtidar Raza, official of an oil company. It is never meant to be a part of the government revenues.

During the last six years, he said, the government had collected, on an average, over Rs250 billion on this head every year. “So far it has earned Rs 1.5 trillion but no-one knows how much it has invested on exploration and how much it has been holding with it.”

Raza said even if the government was to be believed that it gave a subsidy of Rs38 billion in the last year or so, where had the rest of money gone?, he asked.

“The government must come clean on these figures,” demands a banker. Since the levying of the tax, he said, the government had conveniently made it a part of its revenues. “This is unconstitutional. The government is lying, as it has been doing so on many other areas of the economy, about the true expenditure and revenue from this head,” he believed.

“The government has been passing on any fluctuation on hapless consumers, rather more than the increase in the world market. When it supposedly froze the price, it increased it eight times. During this period every government minister was harping on the `freeze mantra’ but prices went up by over 15 per cent,” he claimed. —Staff Reporter