Questioning government’s ‘math credentials’, PN misses $49 brent oil price

The Nationalist Party has accused the government of failing at mathematics, whilst missing that the price of brent crude oil has spiked to $49 a barrell.

In a statement, the opposition said Prime Minister Joseph Muscat had failed in both delivering a power station on time and was now failing in calculating the price of oil.

“The international price of oil was of $110 a barrel when Joseph Muscat was elected Prime Minister. Today, the price is of $40 a barrel,” the PN said. “A secondary school student is capable of working out a simple sum and concluded that the prices fell by 75%, and not by 35%.”

The Opposition said that, “even if the Prime Minister is telling the truth – which he isn’t – he’d still be robbing the people because that price drop was not passed on to the consumers”.

The PN added that diligent people were now talking about a drastic drop in oil prices.

Although on Monday the price of crude oil did fall to around $40 a barrel, the price of brent oil has now reached almost $50 per barrel.

According to Reuters, the price of both US crude and Brent oil leaped dramatically during this week’s trading. Brent crude gained over 15 percent while US West Texas Intermediate (WTI) soared 17 percent. The sharp rise is attributed to positive dynamics in the world’s stock markets and news of shrinking crude supplies.

WTI rose over 4.5 percent to $44.50 per barrel, while Brent crude gained 3.8 percent at $49.36 per barrel, as of 15:50 GMT on Friday.

In a statement, the Labour Party said the last time the price of Brent crude oil was at $40 was in February 2009.

“When you see such mistakes you understand how Enemalta was brought to the brink of bankruptcy and required a €725 million guarantee by the Nationalist government,” the PL said.

The PL added that the Opposition had equally ignored the exchange rate from the euro to the dollar which dropped from $1.30 to $1.13.