The distributor claims that in its “sagacity” the Senate missed some price manipulation operations.
First to call for a parliamentary inquiry into the roots of inflation in supermarkets, Michel-Édouard Leclerc is now challenging its conclusions. Invited to FranceInfo on Monday, the distributor returned to this file, and more particularly to the opinion of senators, who looked at price increases on the shelves.
Faced with the war in Ukraine and the cascading rise in prices, Michel-Édouard Leclerc had called on elected officials about a month ago to scrutinize more closely the possible effects of opportunity, on the part of actors who would benefit from the context to artificially raise prices. After several weeks of examination, the Senate has delivered its report, the conclusions of which go against the arguments of the president of the strategic committee of E.Leclerc stores. “No massive phenomenon of suspicious increases in supplier prices has been observed […]. There may of course be some one-off windfall effects, but no regular disconnection has been observed between these two phenomena, which would unjustifiably inflate the level of inflation.“Write the senators in their report published last week.
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The elected officials also passed the buck to the distributors, suggesting that they were able to apply “sales price increases on their shelves even though they had not signed an increase in the purchase price of the product with the supplier“. A conclusion criticized by Michel-Édouard Leclerc, who claimed that in his “sagacity», «the Senate says it has not seen manipulation, but consumers have. The professional cited in particular the case of sunflower oil, which “come back“on the shelves”when there was no harvest» since the beginning of the shortage of this product, largely imported from Ukraine.
Gasoline at cost price
While the issue of inflation is fueling tensions on purchasing power, Michel-Édouard Leclerc also announced that the group’s shopping centers would practice, from this Thursday and on the occasion of the weekend of crossover on the holiday route, an operationpetrol at cost price“. In other words, the distributor will not make a margin during this period. This operation will no doubt bethe last» Of the kind, warned the distributor, the climate law voted during the previous five-year period providing for the prohibition of promotion and reduction operations on fossil fuels. This provision is to come into force from the end of August. Faced with rising energy prices, Michel-Édouard Leclerc is calling for this date to be postponed.
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In any case, the war in Ukraine will have to weigh on energy supplies in France. “We have planned for a scenario where Russia stops exporting and Germany needs help“, argues the distributor. In this scenario, it does not exclude that the signs close at certain times in order to consume less energy, or that the bread ovens remain shut down during critical hours of energy consumption.
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