The inflation crisis is international. Much of the revaluations which pushed the price index to a record 6.2% in January, was mainly fuelled by imported raw materials and goods or by the synchronised pan-European increase in energy goods, with natural gas being the «trigger stone».
However, this is anything but an alibi for the callousness with which the Mitsotakis government is facing the drama that the vast majority of households are living in the face of inflated electricity, gas and fuel bills, weekly shopping at the supermarket and the farmer's market.
First of all, because the government participates in the European institutions that have been treating the wave of price increases since the autumn as a temporary one that did not require any intervention. Then, because even now, when revaluations are eroding household incomes, the government stubbornly refuses to reduce special taxes and VAT, which would bring immediate relief. It is limited to a vague promise of some subsidy relief for the poorest.
However, there is also an entirely domestic dimension to the energy shortage, in which the government and its appointees are fully complicit: the PPC game at the expense of consumers.
PPC, shortly before its privatisation, borrowed €1.6 billion from the markets with bonds linked to the «green transition".». It even celebrated this loan, which forced it to abandon the use of lignite in the name of reducing polluting emissions and to switch to the massive use of natural gas in its power stations.
But when the price of gas began to rise, up to quadruple, increasing the price of electricity accordingly, the PPC with absolute cynicism passed the cost to consumers through the infamous indexation clause. The clause doubled, and in some cases even tripled, the bills that started to arrive to consumers from November onwards.
This burden would have been halved if PPC had been allowed, even temporarily, to make wider use of lignite reserves for power generation.
In this way, the government, together with the leadership of the PPC, is discrediting the climate change targets. Thus, are turning the green transition into a «greenwashing» of their cynicism at the expense of unsuspecting consumers.
From efsyn.gr
