Tesco has apologised for selling contaminated fuel and offered to pay for the damage it caused -- despite at first denying responsibility.
Britain's biggest supermarket chain has taken out full-page ads in national newspapers today saying that its fuel is back to normal, and saying sorry. Underneath, it says: “More to the point, we’d like to pay for the repairs.”
Investigators traced the source of the fuel contamination to storage tanks at a depot in Essex that supplies a number of different retailers. However, Tesco appeared to be the biggest seller of contaminated fuel when the story first emerged last week -- although its first reaction was deny responsibility.
"We and our suppliers rigorously test all our fuels to the highest possible standards. We have carried out extensive tests on current and past batches of unleaded fuel to the European EN228 standard and have discovered no abnormalities or contamination whatsoever," said the Tesco statement on Thursday 1 March.
"We source from exactly the same suppliers and our fuel originates from the same depots as many of our competitors, and so if a problem did emerge it could not by definition be Tesco-specific."
The original statement continued: "We are aware of a small number of customer concerns regarding this particular issue. While we take matters of product quality very seriously indeed and will continue to monitor the situation, it is unfortunately quite common for mistaken rumours to arise as to the provenance of car maintenance issues."
Tesco has a freephone line for reporting fuel problems: 0800 0286428.
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