VCCI: Consider eliminating gas, electricity prices as subject to confidentiality

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VCCI said that the price of gasoline doesn’t need to be in the list of State secrets. Photo: Nguyen Thanh.

Remove electricity and gasoline prices from the list

The VCCI has just sent comments to the Ministry of Industry and Trade on the draft Decision of the Prime Minister on the list of State secrets of Industry and Trade.

According to the Draft, petrol and electricity prices are being consulted and not published as classified documents.

The VCCI said that gasoline and electricity prices are very important input parameters for businesses to plan production and business plans. Therefore, many businesses need to know early decisions on adjusting the price of petrol and electricity from the State.

The petrol price plan could be published to avoid speculation, as happened many years ago. There used to be a phenomenon before every increase in price, the gas stations took technical reasons to stop selling gasoline, affecting the gasoline demand of people and businesses.

However, thanks to the inspection and handling by state agencies and key enterprises, this situation has been greatly reduced and has seen no recurrence in the past few years.

Currently, the mechanism for adjusting gasoline prices and the method of calculating prices is stipulated in detail in Decree 83/2014 / ND-CP. Based on these rules, it is relatively easy to predict when to adjust prices.

"Prior to each price adjustment, some newspapers gave very accurate forecasts of petrol price plans based on public input parameters in the international market. In fact, these forecasts do not have a big impact on normal petroleum trading activities in the market,” VCCI said.

For electrical products, according to VCCI: Due to the characteristics of simultaneous production and consumption, the speculative risk of this item is very unlikely. It is just a phenomenon of increasing electricity usage before each price increase can affect the transmission capacity of the line system. However, this risk is not high and is easily handled through technical and operational measures (for example, selecting a time of price adjustment when the load capacity is low).

For the above reasons, VCCI asked the drafting agency to re-evaluate the negative and positive effects and consider eliminating the unpublished petrol and electricity prices from the list of State secrets of the Industry and Trade sector.

Import-export operating documents

One of the contents in the Draft is fairly detailed by VCCI as a document on goods import and export management.

In the Draft, Article 1.19 stipulates: "The plan of export and import of special commodities holding an important position in the development and protection of the country not yet publicized" will be subject to state secrets. Article 2.18 stipulates: “Planning and measures for managing import and export, ensuring the balance between supply and demand, stabilizing the public market” are also confidential. These regulations all allow state agencies to propose plans and measures to intervene in goods import and export activities.

VCCI argues that, if these are state-owned goods, the State has complete import and export rights and these plans and measures can be kept secret as decisions of the owner. However, if these are goods owned by other individuals or organizations, the State's interventions should be extremely limited and must be made public.

Currently, the Law on Foreign Trade Management has provisions on the right to freedom of import and export of goods in Article 5. The declaration of protection of the rights to export and import goods is very important for businesses because it ensures a stable, predictable investment and business environment, which plays a fundamental role in economic development.

The VCCI said that interventions on the right to import and export goods is also stipulated in the Law on Foreign Trade Administration such as administrative measures, technical measures, quarantine, trade remedies andemergency control. Through review, these measures must be widely announced, publicized, even some measures must be consulted widely before being applied.

"If the import and export management measures mentioned in Article 1.19 and Article 2.18 of the Draft are prescribed in the Law on Foreign Trade Management, they should be promulgated in accordance with the procedures order of this Law, so no need to put on the state secrets list,”the VCCI said.