The Greek government announced on Wednesday a ceiling on the profit margin for fuel, food and other essentials amid the war in the Middle East and a broader financial insecurity. The measures goes into effect immediately and aims to combat profiteering.
Fines for violations can be up to 5,000,000 euros.
The measures are in effect until June 30, 2026, when they will be reviewed based on the developments in the Middle East.
With a legislative act that is being promoted immediately and is expected to be published in the Official Gazette by evening, the government is implementing emergency measures for the purchase of fuel and basic goods, with the aim of preventing profiteering phenomena amid international turmoil.
The measures will be in effect until June 30 and concern industry, supermarkets, fuel trading companies and gas stations, with a ceiling on profit margins and intensified controls.
The measures
Fuel
Trading companies will not be able to impose a profit margin bigger than 5 cents per liter on gasoline and diesel, while gas stations will not be able to exceed 12 cents per liter on the final price to consumers.
At the same time, special regulation is provided for island areas, where due to increased transportation costs, different limits may be set by ministerial decision.
Food and basic necessities
A ceiling is also imposed on profit margins for basic necessities and food.
No product will be able to be sold with a higher profit margin than what was in force in 2025.
The measures were presented by the minister of Energy & Environment and the Deputy Prime Minister.
The Energy minister emphasized that the country has increased energy resilience, as over 50% of electricity production now comes from renewable energy sources.
Fines for violations reach up to 5 million euros and the measure reportedly concerns wholesale trade, supermarkets, industry and product distribution companies.
“Profit is legitimate, profiteering is not,” the ministers noted stressing “there is no issue of adequacy and supply, particularly in the energy sector adding that “Greece is not energy dependent on the Strait of Hormuz region.”
Earlier on Wednesday, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis had announced the measures saying:
“Obviously we cannot deal with the primary price increases, but we are sending a message that social unrest cannot lead to phenomena of profiteering,” Mitsotakis stressed.
PS Social unrest leads to profiteering or the other way around? Whatever…
I do in not believe that any government in the world is capable of calculating profit margins of goods sold retail. The difficulty and cost of doing this is phenomenal. My hope is that Mitsotakis and his ND clowns are just posturing, for political effect; my fear is that these idiots might actually use AI to try to do this. The horrors that would result are indescribable: look at the UK post office miscarriages of justice (and suicides) for a small version of what would likely happen. And the UK catastrophe was with normal computer programs and human cover-ups, not with crazy AI delusional nonsense.
It’s always believed that supermarkets are profiteering but the evidence is slim. I don’t know the figures for Greece but Tesco, the UK’s biggest supermarket chain, operates on a net profit margin of between 2% and 4%. That doesn’t suggest profiteering to me?
I think fuel is a different matter. When oil prices went down fuel companies claimed that they couldn’t drop their price at the pump because they had locked in contracts at a fixed price well into the future to ensure supply. When oil prices went up the price at the pump increased the next day.
Yes, we’ve all seen this happen time and time again with no repercussions!
It’s well-known to economists that cultural patterns are almost as important as supply and demand factors. In the case of all of Europe, prices are described as “upwardly flexible, and sticky downwards”; across the continent, including the UK, businesses readily increase prices but are VERY slow to reduce them when their supply costs lower. This is really the issue that the European Commission and the other idiots at national level need to address; however, they are far too busy trying to include Ukraine in the EU to do anything else.
As far as profiteering and supermarkets are concerned, I am not convinced that we know the actual profit margins of any large businesses. There are so many tricks available to them, especially multinationals (which most are); and the fact that they expend large sums on top accountants and lawyers tells us that they have a reason to spend this money. The reason is tax avoidance: Amazon is one of the most appalling cases, along with exploiting its workforce and dubious market practices.
However, I repeat (with a variance) my comment above: I do not think that any country is capable of addressing these issues. In theory, the European Commission could do so, and especially in coordination with the USA. That coordination was in place until the moron George W. Bush became President — and abolished all the legal actions trying to rein in Microsoft. Now, the USA is run by a coterie of lunatics and far-right maniacs; the EU is run by money-grubbing idiots, with appalling track records. There is not much hope that politics in the western world will do anything about the emerging techno-feudalist form of capitalism that is already obvious to most. We are in for a rough next few decades, if not centuries.