Turkish energy authorities go after jet fuel cheaters

Merve Erdil - ISTANBUL

REUTERS Photo

Energy authorities have recently uncovered huge fuel fraud methods in use in Turkey and now they prepare to launch serious measures to prevent the use of this system, through which untaxed jet fuels are bought by several fuel distribution companies and sold to the automotive fuel market illegally for higher prices. 

Jet fuels are sold to airline companies without special consumption taxes to encourage the rise of the sector in Turkey. Energy authorities have, however, seen that several fuel distribution companies buy this sort of fuel free of taxes and sell to the automotive fuel dealers, but not to the airplanes. 

These companies make profit up to 1.5 liras per liter by illegally selling the jet fuels, although the average profit margin is around 37 kuruş in the automotive fuels distribution sector. 

The authorities are preparing to start tax rebates for the special consumption taxes in the sector by July 1 to prevent such illegal methods. 

“We saw a company bought two tankers of jet fuel from the Kırıkkale refinery by claiming it would take the fuel to several planes in the Elazığ Airport. The police forces, however, caught one of the tankers unloading the fuel to a dealer in the Aegean province of Manisa and the other in another fuel dealer in the eastern province of Ağrı. When the documents of the airplanes were then examined, the police saw that all these documents had been fake and the airplanes had never been existed,” said an official from the energy watchdog EPDK. 

Source from EPDK also added they now work with Turkey’s refinery TÜPRAŞ and the aviation authorities to follow and double-check the airplanes and their actual fuel needs. 

The same fraud method is also used in bunker fuels as well and two different fuel markers will be online to track the ships, which buy fuels.