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Got gas? ‘Cause Emarat doesn’t and they won’t share why

April 20, 2011 12:16 by shafeer

So the blogosphere and a few dailies have picked up the fuel shortages in Dubai. There’s irony in finding the one of the cities of a major oil producing country run out of the stuff, which is probably why Emarat has been dilly-dallying on putting out an official statement on why gas stations are empty…to prevent the possible egg-on-face repercussion. Or is it?

Did they hope people wouldn’t think anything was going on when as petrol stations turn down their business?  Ah the good old ‘sweep under the rug’ move…a regional classic, wouldn’t you say?

The latest explanation comes from the company official who asked not to be named *eyebrow appropriately raised here*.  He told Reuters on Wednesday that the fuel shortage is due to a “cargo that failed to discharge at port” due to a “logistical problem.” It was all because of one cargo that delayed the whole lot. He also said that the problem should be fixed in 2 to 3 days.

There, that wasn’t so hard was it? Just say ‘Something went wrong (as they often do) and we’re fixing it.’ And yet it still had to come from an anonymous source.

Was the fear because customers might be go to competitor stations Enoc and Eppco? Well, that’s happening anyway. Rather than alerting the public that it will be only 2 or 3 days of inconvenience, people are having to guesstimate and probably just stick to rival stations to get their gas. How would they know to go back to Emarat otherwise?

Barring the possibility of course that they are not entertaining any sort of transparency to discourage further discussions into the underlying reasons for a petrol company to, well, run out of its bread and butter.

Kipp’s seen these discrepancies before and, Kipp’s buddy, Alex McNabb points these out in his blog, Fake Plastic Souks, where he points out that ADNOC couldn’t keep up with demand before and ran out of stock and that Emarat had similar problems last year where the company offered differing reasons for the shortage to Gulf News. The initial reason was that the company was finding it difficult to continue selling petrol below cost and was trying to ration its produce.  And then hours later, the article was changed to say the reason was ‘technical issues’.

As Alex says “We can only assume ‘technical issues’ are once again to blame.” And lo and behold, a few hours after, an article is released using an anonymous official quoted as saying it was. after all, a technical issue.

Now, pass the Kool Aid please…

Tags: Blog, Emarat, gas, gas stations, oil, petrol, petrol stations, technical issue