No excise duty on insurance, satellite or vehicles

thesis This is the part of the law that says nothing about work and that almost nobody read, and yet it touches the cost structure of every project we follow. The six categories in article 195 are not a random list: they are, almost exactly, the equipment basket of a remote operation — vehicles, engines, satellite communication and insurance. A selective consumption tax was designed with the consumer buying a luxury item in mind; who actually ends up paying it, in a copper or gas project, is the fleet capex line and the communications opex line. ⇒ The expected consequence is that equipping a field operation gets cheaper, and gets cheaper the further it is from where people live, because that is where fleet and satellite link weigh most. ⚠️ What we cannot state is by how much: we did not open the Excise Duties Law to find out what rate applied to each category, so we know the tax is gone but not what percentage of the final price that translates into. And there is one precedent that calls for caution about pass-through: a tax that is scrapped does not always lower prices by the same amount, particularly in markets with few suppliers such as performance bonds. thesis