Originally Published on ft.lk
We thank the Ceylon Petroleum Corporation (CPC) for its response (Daily FT, 7 July 26 https://www.ft.lk/opinion/Right-of-Reply-CPC-responds-to-Verit%C3%A9-Research-opinion-column-on-pricing/14-794310) to our Op-ed “The price is wrong, twice: Sri Lanka’s fuel is both overpriced and underpriced” (Daily FT, 15 July 2026 See https://www.ft.lk/ft_view__editorial/The-price-is-wrong-twice-Sri-Lanka-s-fuel-is-both-overpriced-and-underpriced/58-793292). Three brief observations are warranted.
First, the only informational point the response presents as contradicting our Op-ed is that Government fuel subsidies and pricing decisions apply across all licenced fuel marketing companies, and not to CPC alone. But our Op-ed took exactly that point as given. The comparison with other market players rests on the premise that they operate under the same subsidies and the same prices as CPC. Any reading of the article that suggests otherwise would be a misreading. What warrants correcting, then, is the misreading — not our Op-ed as written.
For how the Government subsidy is cleverly designed to be fiscally neutral, see the article “Fuel Price Shock Does Not Have to be Passed on Fully to Consumers: Why and How?” published in PublicFinance.LK. It is precisely because the central Government is providing this subsidy — effectively a refund of the excess tax collected due to price increases — that CPC has no grounds to claim the losses it claims from the sale of fuel.
Second, the response claims that our Op-ed contains statements that are “factually incorrect” and “unsupported by evidence”. That claim falls on its own sword: the response offers no data or evidence whatsoever to substantiate it. The analysis in our Op-ed, by contrast, was built on CPC’s own published purchase prices, the Government’s published subsidy, and global market prices. We would have been glad to receive information — if any exists — that would change the analysis. Unfortunately, none has been provided.
Third, the response lectures the media that material should not be “published without proper verification of the relevant data”, and that “information published on matters of national economic importance be based on verified facts and reliable evidence”. The irony is that this advice, if it had been applied, would have prevented the publication not of our Op-ed — which is anchored in published data — but of the response to it by CPC, which contains none.
The question posed by our Op-ed therefore remains on the table, unanswered: why does the main State institution that supplies fuel in Sri Lanka pay more to purchase it than comparable suppliers, in Sri Lanka and in the rest of the world?