A large number of people seen waiting at petrol pumps for the filling of vehicles, while asked about long queues the petrol owners said no petrol availability in small cities of the country. The situation seems worst in major cities like Lahore, Gujranwala, and Faisalabad where several petrol pumps have either no or a limited supply of petrol from the last few days. The oil companies are not providing petrol to the needed demand.
In Lahore around 70 of the total 450 pumps are dry. The area where pumps are not open due to shortage of petrol is shahdara, Wagah, Litton Road, and Jain mandar. Taking about other cities like Gujranwala around 70 percent of pumps had no petrol due to a short providing of oil from oil managing companies. Moreover, many pumps are also without petrol for the last several days in Faisalabad, Okara, Sahiwal, and other districts.
However, the minister of the state of petroleum Musadik malik claimed that there is no shortage of fuel as stock of petrol is available for the next 20 days and diesel for 25 days. He warned that the licensing of those petrol stations will canceled if they sell petrol at expensive rates. Some petrol pumpshavestored the petrol and are likely to supply after the slight increase in petrol price. Some companies which failed to import petroleum products due to the issues of the opening of letter of credit LC were unable to supply the fuel to the retail outlets which led to the shortage of products.
Only the top six petroleum companies had a stock of petroleum products which are PSO, TOTAL, SHELL, and APL. The remaining oil companies have not been able to import petroleum products due to LCs. The officials noted that the 3800 retail outlets got shifted to retail outlets of six companies observing that the current crisis could continue until the deal with IMF is done and there is no dollar available in the market to import petroleum products. The oil company advisory council OCAC already warned the state bank of Pakistan and the petroleum division about the upcoming petrol crisis in the country due to the issue in the opening of LCs to import petroleum products, Even PSO has canceled cargo because of LCs issues.
Petroleum dealers are continuing the shortage of products as the oil companies are not supplying fuel to them. The OGRA has sent off a team to check the availability of petrol and diesel at the stations. Experts say there seemed no governance as the petroleum division had failed to handle the oil dealers’ mafia that had been looting the consumer by creating an artificial shortage of petrol and diesel.
