Responding to a parliamentary question from Mars Di Bartolomeo (LSAP) on 26 August, finance minister Pierre Gramegna (DP) shared sales figures for both petrol and diesel for the first six months of 2019 and 2018 (see charts below).

If sales fell 6.2% from May to June 2019, this is largely because of a sharp uptick in sales in April, likely an effect of the announced increase in duty of 2 cents per litre for diesel and 1 cent for petrol.

Indeed by June 2019, the sale rate had returned to the same figure for June 2018. Petrol sales saw a smaller spike in April 2019 and by June were slightly above the rate of a year earlier.

Last week, Statec published a report which found that the excise duty increase adds on average €25 to a household’s annual expenditure. It concluded that lowest earning families were more likely to drive diesel vehicles and therefore be slightly more penalised by the increase than higher income households.