The Anti-Monopoly Committee of Ukraine, or AMCU, has fined the companies WOG, OKKO and SOCAR — which operate gas stations across the country — for price collusion.
The three chains must now pay a collective Hr 77 million, or $2.9 million.
The committee’s May 14 decision on the companies’ “concerted anti-competitive actions” was the final step in an investigation that started in 2017, Yuriy Terentyev, the AMCU chairman, wrote on Facebook.
Collectively, OKKO, WOG and SOCAR sell around one third of all high-octane gasoline and diesel fuel in Ukraine. In 2017, the AMCU began to suspect that they had set similar, high prices for A95 gasoline and diesel.
Between Jan. 1 to Dec. 19, 2017, prices for these two fuels increased by 17.3 percent and 21.7 percent, respectively, at both WOG and OKKO gas stations, according to AMCU.
And during two weeks in September 2017, all three companies simultaneously raised prices by more than 5.5 percent, thereby eliminating competition between them.
According to the AMCU, this created a situation where consumers had few options to choose a gas station based upon price.
Now, OKKO must pay around $1.3 million, while SOCAR will hand over $1 million and WOG will pay $580,000, the AMCU wrote on its official web site.
Yana Lesteva, head of public relations and communications at SOCAR Energy Ukraine, denies any wrongdoing by the company.
“Since the pricing mechanism for retail petroleum products is transparent and public, and SOCAR, like a number of other market players, regularly provides all the information required by a legislation to regulatory authorities, this situation does not look logical,” said Lesteva. “The AMCU does not want to recognize the real problems of the energy market.”
OKKO told the Kyiv Post that currently is not ready to comment AMCU ruling until all the circumstances are examined by the company. WOG did not respond to request for comment.
This is not the first time that the committee has fined these companies for price collusion.
In October 2016, it fined OKKO, WOG, SOCAR, and four other companies a total of Hr 204.3 million (roughly $7.8 million) for the same violation.
According to Terentyev, since then, price competition on the Ukrainian market for petroleum products has gotten better.
“We don’t have a situation anymore when half of the market keeps artificially higher prices ‘set’ by the so-called ‘market leaders,’” Terentyev wrote on Facebook.
Still, the AMCU’s decisions have not been without controversy. In March 2017, the Kyiv Commercial Court ruled that the committee’s decision to fine WOG more than Hr 54 million ($2 million) was invalid because the AMCU had not proved that other companies raised their prices due to collusion.
