It seems to me that there are more taxes or fees buried in that price other than what you are charged retail at the pump ie VAT. The gas at EDMA is 2.26 w/o and 2.69 with VAT. Yet when I spoke to Warter a Polish refiner they offered a price significantly lower than that. Just made a mental note of it didnt write it down so cant quote numbers. Also how can Belgrade sell it for so cheap if the raw product itself costs the same everywhere? At KHTO the morons, and I use that term very conservatively, that own the airport (Town of East Hampton) insisted we put tanks in the ground (1st Moron the Fire Marshall) then they insisted that the tanks be less than 12,000 gal (2. Moron the Town supervisor), the pilots were willing to do a coop with our own money so that the town would not have to shell out anything but the town board vetoed that idea (3rd set of Morons). So due to partial loads and 5x the cost in construction of below as opposed to above ground tanks, we have to pay the town a flowage fee to cover the fuel farm. Now in the 25 yrs that the farm has been there it has been paid many times over for the cost of construction but the fuel price is and will always be at a premium due to split load deliveries.
So that is one way to increase the cost of a unit of gas. However I think that not all places have such an inefficient system built in. So while EDMA might be getting gas for much less since it is a govt owned entity they might be tacking on fees for municipality income.
Indeed there is not only VAT but also “mineral oil tax” which varies from country to country – e.g. France wanted to promote diesel engines so diesel was comparatively less taxed than gasoline.
In general the proceeds of the tax go (or should go) towards the upkeep and development of the transport infrastructure.
I don’t know how Belgrade get their pricing – I wouldn’t be surprised if JetA1 sales subsidy Avgas sales; after all considering the huge difference in volumes, an infinitesimal hike of JetA1 can make a world of difference if converted into Avgas subsidies… same as private jet traffic in the US subsidises piston GA’s access to FBOs after all.
some bright spark at the Finance Ministry thought the country is so big it’s actually unlikely for (private) pilots to ever go abroad….
Actually, they determined that Swiss private pilots are all kazillionaires who can be fleeced without noticing. And that is the political correct variant…. others say that they wanted to get one up on the class enemy private pilot….. the end result is the same.
France wanted to promote diesel engines so diesel was comparatively less taxed than gasoline.
and the UK determined that diesel should be taxed such as to make it unattractive.
Low volume usage is the problem, we will reduce the price of the AVGAS to reflect the cost at the time of the next delivery. The curent price reflects the price of the AVGAS when it was delivered into the storage tanks.
you can’t expect airfields to make a loss on the fuel they sell just because some one a long way up the supply chain has reduced their prices, it takes time to filter down especially with low volume operations who do not have fuel supply as their primary business.
I think LYBE is simply selling the stuff free of duty and VAT.
For all the negative talk we read online all the time about the imminent demise of avgas, it is actually a nice high margin product, and no company is going to drop something which makes a nice juicy contribution to their fixed costs.
Oil companies are not stupid and their accountants will understand the – for many accountants, revolutionary – concept of marginal costing 
An airfield makes about €0.40 per litre on avgas which is way more than a petrol station makes. I work above one and their gross margins are about 1/10 of that; of course their volume is huge so it is still worth their while to be in business.
Around 2008 I picked up 100LL in Croatia for €0.60 per litre. It was done the then traditional way (which doesn’t work anymore) involving getting it invoiced to (what looked like) a company name, paying cash of course, and saying the word “commercial” 3 times in a John Cleese voice. Used to work in Spain, too.
All that has been tightened up and everybody wants to see a copy of your AOC now. If you can produce that piece of paper (and I dare say photoshop experts have got the message a long time ago, too, and it’s a very good reason for a flying school to get an AOC, even the cheapest possible A-to-A one) you get fuel duty free and probably VAT free too. Getting the VAT back is normal for a business anyway. It’s getting the duty back that needs the AOC.
There are UK airports which sell VAT free avgas if you depart abroad. I really don’t understand how they work that – it isn’t possible in the normal course of business, selling hardware.
There are UK airports which sell VAT free avgas if you depart abroad. I really don’t understand how they work that – it isn’t possible in the normal course of business, selling hardware.
It is if you have a certificate of export. We export every week to the USA and Europe and it’s all invoiced without VAT.
To export to the EU, VAT free, you need a valid EU VAT number from the customer, in order to not have to add VAT.
To export to non-EU, there is no issue anyway and you do not add VAT.
In both cases above the item has to be despatched to the final address. If it is despatched to a UK address (e.g. to a UK based forwarding agent) we have to get a bit of paper from the agent (your certificate of export, presumably) certifying the goods left the UK.
Is there any way around the above?
Presumably the said airports have an agreement with Customs to treat a flight departing outside the UK as a “certificate of export” but how does that work with an EU destination?
I think you have it spot on Peter, the other interesting thing is that services rendered in one EU country for a VAT registered customer in another EU country is also invoiced without VAT
Yes, though there is a great deal of “guidance” from Customs about how exactly the place of delivery is determined 
If you live in say the UK and write some software in the UK for a customer in Germany, and you have a valid VAT # for the customer, you invoice without the VAT. For all that Customs care, the software might have been actually written in India…
But if you despatch some physical material, you have to be more careful. Many years ago we used to get requests from certain customers who wanted to collect goods from our UK office and who claimed they were departing for say Saudi Arabia. They wanted the VAT taken off. No way could we do that. (The procedure is for them to reclaim the VAT upon leaving the UK – I think it’s a bit involved and is designed to discourage people from doing it too casually).
The above seems exactly the same as the airport not charging the VAT to departing flights. They have no way of knowing where you will actually land, etc. But hey they can’t all be stupid so they must have got official guidance on it
Just got this from Shoreham EGKA
We have now managed to sell most of our old fuel stocks that we purchased at the higher price. We have over 40,000 litres of fuel arriving tomorrow at the new prices. We are now able to reduce our prices to the following (effective from tomorrow morning):
AVGAS £1.53 plus VAT
JETA1 89 pence plus VAT
So things are moving own eventually…
