Oil executives of Britain’s biggest oil companies British Petroleum (BP) and Royal Dutch Shell could face jail penalty if it is proved they conspired to manipulate oil prices, British Prime Minister David Cameron has warned.
Cameron said he is urgently looking at extending criminal offences to cover market rigging in the oil sector, after BP and Shell London headquarters were raided by European regulators for possible evidence of price manipulation.
The Prime Minister increased the pressure on the two oil giants by saying that the new legislation brought in after the Libor rate-rigging scandal could also be applied to energy sector.
Å“Itâ„¢s totally unacceptable for firms to fix prices and force consumers to pay more. That’s why we are looking at how to extend this criminal offence to the energy sector to make sure that those who manipulate benchmark prices feel the full force of the law,” Cameron said.
Gustaf Duhs, of one of the UK’s leading national law firms Stevens & Bolton, said oil price manipulation allegations, if correct, could have added more than £2,000 to the average household petrol bill over the past decade.
BP and Shell are suspected of oil price rigging since 2002. Over more than ten years, the price of a litre of petrol has risen dramatically by more than 80 percent to about £1.35 a litre.
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This article originally appeared on : Press TV