The government this morning insisted that European consumers paid an average of €1.45 for petrol and €1.32 for diesel.

Referring to a statement issued yesterday by the Nationalist Party in which the PN insisted that the price of petrol and diesel in Malta was substantially higher than the average in the European Union and the absolute majority of EU states, the government said the prices could be seen here.

The government said that in a bid to justify its wrong calculations, the PN was gathering information from unofficial sites which were not in line with the scientific figures provided by the European Commission.

It said that since the Opposition believed that the price of untaxed petrol and diesel in Malta should be the same as Sweden’s, it should explain how, in the beginning of March 2013, these were, according to theEU statistics, seven per cent lower than in Malta.

It said that while the prices of petrol and diesel in Malta were €1.09 and €1.02 respectively in the beginning of March 2008, they had gone up to €1.48 and €1.38 by the beginning of March 2013 as a result of the bad decisions taken by then minister Tonio Fenech.