It said this when diesel went up 80 sen on March 12, it said this when diesel went up another 80 sen on March 19, and it said this again yesterday when diesel went up yet another 80 sen to RM5.52 per litre.
That is three consecutive weeks of the same increase, to the sen, in a market that has been anything but stable.
I found that odd, so I looked at what happened to global oil prices during the same period. Brent crude surged to US$119 per barrel on March 19 as the Middle East conflict escalated, then fell sharply to US$99.75 by March 25 on ceasefire hopes, a swing of nearly 17 percent in less than a week.
The global market moved dramatically in both directions, yet the output of the government’s pricing formula did not move at all. It produced the same 80 sen increase three times in a row, as though the underlying market conditions were identical each week, which they plainly were not.
This matters because of what the Automatic Pricing Mechanism (APM) is supposed to do. A formula driven by market inputs should reflect...