Prime Minister and Minister of Finance, the Hon. Philip Davis spoke to reporters outside of cabinet this week concerning the rise in fuel margins proposed by members of the Bahamas Petroleum Retailers Association.
On the concerns of gas retailers Mr. Davis said, “a lot of the challenges they face I’m sympathetic to and I understand their need to survive. I’ve asked them to give us another two weeks to assess the situation to see how we could help them. The challenge we have is how we prevent further burden on the traveling public. And we need to see how we can delicately balance bringing relief to them and at the same time not overly burdening the consumers.”
Vice President of the Bahamas Petroleum Retailers Association, Vasco Bastian also commented on the progress of discussions with government. He said, “we haven’t signed off on anything yet and so until we sign off on everything then we’ll say we got everything. But I’ll tell you this meeting this evening was better than the first one and it was better than the discussion we would have had with Simon Wilson and Michael Halkitis so we’ve gotten to where we need to be. We are right near the finishing line and I think once we meet again next week we should be able to sign on the dotted line.”
