The Farmers’ Force has expressed its discontent with the recently announced scheme for partially refunding the excise on diesel fuel used in agriculture. The organization said it will talk with farmers to stage protests unless the rules are changed by next week.
“We find that the Government has violated the De-offshorization Law of 2020, which prohibits the subsidization of companies whose founders, shareholders, partners, administrators, or effective beneficiaries are registered or reside in jurisdictions that do not implement international standards of transparency. And so, agroholdings that are controlled from offshore territories and that own tens of thousands of hectares, even if they could very well do without the government’s support, are, too, among the beneficiaries of this scheme of partial reimbursement of excise duties”, the organization said in a statement.
As a result, it says, the amount earmarked for the reimursement is being diluted.
“Obviously, when diesel fuel sells for almost 27 lei a liter, the reimbursment of less than three percent of the fuel’s value is considered by many agricultural producers to be a trifle. The authors of the Regulation also did not accept our idea of unifying the norm of diesel consumption per hectare and left a very sophisticated calculation mechanism for each group of agricultural crops separately. We cannot explain the logic of the authorities in establishing the period of application of the Regulation, when it is proposed to compensate the excise duty for diesel purchased from the date of entry into force of the normative act, and not for fuel purchased in the entire calendar year 2022”, the statement reads.
The Regulation on the partial compensation of excise duties on diesel used by agricultural producers in 2022 was approved by the Government on Wednesday. According to the document, the excise duties on diesel will be partially compensated - in the amount of 30% of the quota established for 2022, or 894 lei per tonne, up to 100 thousand lei per year per beneficiary.
