In the midst of the people’s worsening suffering due to the successive typhoons that ravaged the country, big oil companies go on raking superprofits with the incessant price hikes of petroleum-based products for the sixth straight week.
On Tuesday, September 30, oil firms are set to increase diesel and kerosene prices by ₱0.90 per liter, while gasoline prices will be reduced by a measly ₱0.20 per liter. Their net increases this 2025 have reached record highs, with diesel increasing by ₱17.05 per liter, gasoline at ₱14.70 per liter, and kerosene at ₱5.45 per liter.
The staggered price increases implemented last July as proposed by the heartless bureaucrats of the Marcos regime have obviously done nothing to bring down oil prices.
Marcos’s Department of Energy (DOE), forever the mouthpiece of oil cartels and big finance, regurgitate the lie that price hikes are unavoidable and are caused by tensions due to Trump’s threats of US economic sanctions against Russia.
This is belied by the fact that from 2023-2025, the spot price of Brent crude oil has decreased from $82 to $68 per barrel, and is projected to decrease to $51 per barrel in 2026. Also, global oil supplies are at all-time highs and world oil production continues to increase, as stated in a September International Energy Agency report.
The incessant oil price increases has less to do with international conflict, and more with speculation. For instance, the consecutive increases in global oil prices immediately after the beginning of US-NATO war on Ukraine were directly due to speculation by imperialist banks in the WTI crude oil market in October 2020-2022.
In the Philippines, local firms have imported the country’s oil inventories at least several months before, long before the international tensions they cite as alibis have even occurred, and at a cheaper price. The artificially-created demand then pushes prices upwards. It is no different to how rice cartels and smugglers hoard supply and cause an artificial decrease in the market.
The artificially-manipulated oil prices make major oil firms in the country rake superprofits. Shell Pilipinas “reported core earnings of ₱2 billion for the first half of 2025, beating the same period last year by 38%.” Meanwhile, billionaire Ramon Ang’s Petron Corporation listed a net profit of ₱4.03 billion in the first quarter of the year, an increase from ₱3.93 billion in the same period last year.
The Marcos Jr regime has shown no interest to moderate the greed of oil cartels, to cut excise taxes or to remove the value-added tax in petroleum products. Why should it, when in 2022, it amassed around ₱150 billion simply from taxing the Filipino people dry? Marcos instead relies on selective, “soft” pork barrel projects that do little to improve the people’s livelihood, as evidenced in the latest budget amendments by the Lower House.
Meanwhile, the people reel from the destruction left by tropical cyclones Mirasol, Nando, Opong over the last two weeks. At least 27 people have died and nearly a million families have been affected. At least 10 local and provincial governments, including Calbayog City and Biliran in Eastern Visayas, have declared a state of calamity. Poor peasants have been the most affected, with agricultural losses exceeding ₱1 billion and wide hectares of palay that were supposed to be harvested, destroyed.
We call on the Filipino people to vehemently denounce the callousness and limitless rapaciousness of big finance, oil cartels, and the Marcos regime. Such greed can never be moderated, and can only be put a stop through a complete overhaul of the system, which can be attained through revolutionary struggle.
