FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. -- With consumers again screaming over rising retail gasoline prices and federal and state officials launching probes and lawsuits, Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel has moved to protect retail gas station operators from backlash, reported LegalNewsline.com.
The AG called a news conference last week in Fayetteville, Ark., to respond to hundreds of calls from Northwest Arkansas residents in the past month complaining of high gasoline prices, added a report by The Morning News.
It is the gasoline refiners, [image-nocss] not the retailers that drive gasoline prices up, said McDaniel, according to a report by The Morning News. The five largest gasoline companiesBP, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell and ConocoPhillipscontrol 50% of the country's refining capacity, he said; 10 years ago, he said, they controlled 33%. Demand for gasoline skyrockets, along with prices, and those companies make record profits because there are less than half the number of refineries there were 25 years ago, he said.
"They have no incentive to build more refineries," McDaniel said.
But McDaniel has resisted the temptation to launch popular but hard-to-prove price-gouging and price-fixing lawsuits against gasoline retailers, added LegalNewsline.com. Instead, he stressed that individual retailers in the region were not to blame for the sharp increase. He pointed out that southern and eastern Arkansas was served by a different pipeline that offered lower prices to the Northwest.
McDaniel explained his position on price gouging more thoroughly in a May 18 consumer alert on the gasoline price issue. He said he could only act against the practice in a state of emergency and that prices in areas recently hit by storms were not excessively high.
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