Eastern Petroleum to cut gas, diesel prices Friday

MANILA, Philippines - Independent oil player Eastern Petroleum on Thursday afternoon announced that it would slash the price of its gasoline products by P3 per liter and diesel by P1 per liter. GMA’s Flash Report quoted Eastern Petroleum president Fernando Martinez as saying the price reduction would take effect at 12:01 of Friday. Since the start of November, the independent oil firm has already taken away a total of P6 for its gasoline products and P4 for diesel. Eastern Petroleum is the fourth oil firm to implement an oil price rollback this week, following its competitors Seaoil Philippines and UniOil Petroleum Philippines, Inc. Seaoil slashed on Tuesday the price of its diesel by P2 and its gasoline and kerosene by P1. Meanwhile, UniOil gave out a much bigger oil price cut of P6 per liter for gasoline and P4 for diesel. Eatsern Petroleum and Flying V have both said that UniOil’s seemingly big-time rollback was actually an accumulation of the two weeks that it has not cutback its prices while others did. In a radio interview earlier in the day, Energy Sec. Angelo Reyes welcomed the latest rounds of price adjustments and even urged other oil firms – especially giants Pilipinas Shell, Chevron, and Petron – to follow suit. Reyes assured the public of more rollbacks in the future but admitted that cuts would have to stop at some point, due to the measures being undertaken by oil exporters to address the plunging world oil prices. “The regional trend is downward. Kaya naman paulit-ulit na ako na there should be a and there will be more rollbacks. We have seen that happen," Reyes said. He said the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) has already called for two "emergency meetings" – in November and December – to talk about the matter. The Russian government, for its part, has already started cutting back on its oil importation. “Kaya hindi tayo dapat maging kampante na bumababa ang presyo eh this will go on and on and on (We can’t be too confident because even if the oil prices currently continue to go down, it can’t go on and on)," Reyes said. - Mark Merueñas, GMANews.TV