(Excerpt from Philstar.com - May 10 '06)

Like their counterparts in the United States, local oil companies are making huge profits amid soaring fuel prices, Palawan Rep. Abraham Mitra revealed yesterday.

Based on their income statements that he obtained from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Mitra said Shell’s net profit last year jumped 102 percent over the previous year to P5.762 billion, while the earnings of Petron, which is partly owned by the government, rose by almost 50 percent to P5.765 billion.

"2005 was a banner year for the oil companies because they kept on increasing their prices. They made a killing at the expense of the Filipino consumer," he said.

The Palawan lawmaker was not able to get a copy of Caltex’s SEC filing.

He said the oil firms’ income statements showed that for every peso of gas pumped into a car, three centavos ended up in the pockets of the companies’ owners in terms of net profit.

He said the huge earnings that local oil firms reported did not include the "windfall profits" made by their parent companies, which supply all their oil requirements.

He said he is not accusing oil firms of "price gouging or excessive profiteering" but that he wanted to "let the public draw its own conclusion from what the cold numbers present."

"Oil firms are not Mother Teresa’s charities but are there to make a profit for their shareholders, so it will be next to impossible to beseech them to temper their appetite for revenues. The best way to punish them is to reduce our patronage of their products by finding alternative fuels and curbing our thirst for oil," he added.

Mitra joined the call of Bukidnon Rep. Juan Miguel Zubiri, principal author of the Biofuels Bill, for the passage of the measure as soon as possible. The bill seeks to develop ethanol as an alternative fuel to replace at least 20 percent of the country’s oil needs.

Mitra said Shell made its huge profits from sales of P149 billion.

In the case of Petron, which is 40-percent owned by Saudi oil giant Saudi-Aramco, sales jumped to P191.2 billion in 2005 from P147.5 billion in 2004.

In terms of tax payments, Petron paid P2 billion in income tax, while Shell, whose net profit is just P3 million higher than Petron’s, paid P590 million more.

He noted that in the US, the American public and their lawmakers are complaining that oil companies are making a killing at a time when oil prices are soaring.

They feel that the oil firms are cheating them. US lawmakers are mulling legislation to curb "price gouging" and to impose a tax on windfall profits.