Gabriel Biriş: "The turnover tax will hit the energy sector hard"

The new minimum turnover tax will severely hit the energy sector, especially the supply and distribution part, Gabriel Biriş, partner at Biriş Goran, said on Tuesday, quoted by Agerpres.

"I want to raise an alarm about the new minimum turnover tax, which will hit the energy sector, especially the supply and distribution side, severely. There are no margins that exceed 6%. They have nowhere to pay this tax of 1% of the turnover", said Biriş at the conference "Romania and the new European energy order", an event organized by the Governance Course.

For his part, Volker Raffel, the general director of E.ON Romania, stated that both in Romania and at the European level, investments must be made in the distribution networks.

"There is good news. The good news is that in your electricity bill only 10% is distribution fee. If we increase the distribution tariff by about 10% it means that your bill will only increase by 1%. (....) With this distribution rate increase, we can end up with a lower electricity price. I recently spoke with a local politician who told me: we don't want to increase the distribution tariff because we don't want to increase the prices for domestic and non-domestic consumers. But if we make this mistake, the same mistake we made two years ago, we blocked investments in Romania with the freezing of distribution tariffs with a wrong decision and because of this I am late with the prosumers. If we make the same mistake one more time we don't solve the problem. The good news is that if we make the right choice we can solve it," said Volker Raffel.