THE GOVERNMENT SHOULD INTENSIFY its efforts to curb oil smuggling instead of considering to regulate again the local oil industry, according to San Miguel Corp. president Ramon S. Ang.

Ang, who is also the chair and CEO of Petron Corp., told reporters that it would be too late anyway to regulate the industry because of the number of oil companies (with their respective investments) that are in place.

?You can?t control it anymore. In short, we have opened up the floodgate,? Ang said when asked if he was in favor of the proposals to regulate the local oil industry.

Although he claimed that he was not partial to either a regulated or a deregulated environment, Ang pointed out that when the oil industry was deregulated, oil smuggling became more rampant.

Citing a study, Ang noted that as much as 30 to 35 percent of the gasoline and diesel being sold in the market today came from oil smuggling. This was equivalent to tax losses for the government of about P30-P35 billion, he added.

For its part, the government has been undertaking several measures to curb the rampant oil smuggling, where it loses some P32 billion in taxes, according to Finance Secretary Margarito Teves.

?That?s something that we need to continuously study. There are ongoing experiments called fuel marking to determine whether certain types of fuel are really the fuel that are consistent with what is actually imported,? Teves said.

?For example, if the fuel is actually jet fuel but the documents suggested it was kerosene, definitely there?s something wrong,? he explained.

Teves noted that by virtue of the technology called ?fuel marking,? the government could minimize the tendency of oil importers to underdeclare or misdeclare their imported petroleum products.

?At the moment, it?s at the experimental stages and I?m as anxious as anybody else to move this toward actual implementation,? he said, adding that the initiative was a joint effort between the government and the private sector.

The Department of Finance earlier said that the use of chemical markers on oil imports would be pilot-tested at the Subic Freeport, Clark Special Economic Zone and the Port of Batangas. Special machinery would be installed in these zones to verify the presence of the right concentration of chemical markers added to the petroleum products.

Internal revenue and customs officials would thus be able to collect the necessary taxes and duties on unmarked oil products.