Lanka IOC lifted the prices of all three of its diesel grades on Tuesday, becoming the third private retailer in a week to pass on global crude costs while state-owned Ceylon Petroleum Corporation held its own rates steady.
Effective April 8, XtraMile Diesel rose by Rs. 39 per litre to Rs. 590, Lanka Super Diesel by Rs. 28 to Rs. 600, and Xtra Green Diesel by Rs. 32 to Rs. 620, Newswire reported. No official reason was given for the revision, but the increase tracks closely with the 20–35% surge in international diesel benchmarks since the Middle East escalation began. Daily Mirror reported the same revision in its breaking news wire.
The company, majority-owned by Indian Oil Corporation, operates around a fifth of Sri Lanka’s retail fuel network. Its diesel grades had last been repriced in early March.
The move creates a three-tier private diesel market alongside Sinopec, which raised its Super Diesel to Rs. 600 on April 7, and CPC, whose state auto diesel price remains unchanged at the politically-sensitive level set at the start of April.
The government’s Rs. 100 per litre diesel subsidy unveiled by President Dissanayake last week applies only to CPC diesel dispensed via QR-code targeting to registered categories such as fisheries and small transporters, and does not extend to fuel bought at Lanka IOC or Sinopec stations. Consumers at private retailers will therefore bear the full revised price.
The widening gap between state and private pump rates comes as Deputy Finance Minister Anil Jayantha Fernando confirmed that Sri Lanka is designing a new automatic tariff adjustment mechanism to track global prices more transparently and will brief the IMF on the framework as part of the current programme review.
