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Australia: Oil price rigging investigation launched

By  |  January 15, 2015

Australian rural communities are paying as much as 14 cents more per liter than their urban counterparts and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) is conducting an investigation into why. ACCC chairman Rod Sims said that the ACCC would investigate into possible cartelization by oil companies and would analyze what drives oil prices. ACCC spokeswoman Renee Smith has condemned the price difference as price gouging and said “There’s just no excuse for charging that sort of price when we’ve had such a big drop in the global oil price.” The ACCC has admitted that cartel activity will be very hard to prove, but it will investigate oil prices as well as transport, storage, distribution, wholesale and retail costs in order to fully explain the prices.

Full Content: The Australian

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