Tadias Magazine
News Update
Published: Thursday, May 12, 2011
Washington, D.C. – The D.C. Attorney General’s Office announced Wednesday that it has launched antitrust probe against the city’s largest owner of gas stations, The Washington Post reports.
As part of a crack down on price gouging at the pump, Attorney General Irvin B. Nathan said he is investigating Capitol Petroleum Group for potential wrongdoing related to the city’s soaring gasoline prices. “Everyone knows that gasoline prices are high,” Nathan said, “and we’re going to do everything we can to bring them down and be sure that it is a competitive market.”
Per The Washington Post: “Capitol Petroleum, based in Springfield, is a regional behemoth, netting $778 million in revenue in 2010, according to its Web site. It “owns, operates or supplies” 164 stations in the D.C. area and 71 stations in New York City. Its primary owner, Eyob “Joe” Mamo, has built the company over nearly 25 years, buying up dozens of service stations in the region — particularly in the past three years. A February Washington City Paper profile of Mamo said the Ethiopian immigrant owned 45 gas stations in the city limits, about half the District’s total, and about one-fourth of the region’s stations.” Read more.
Watch: DC Attorney General Begins Gas Station Probe (WUSA 9)
Related:
Joe Mamo: Meet the Guy Who Owns Half of D.C.’s Filling Stations
Washington City Paper
By Christine MacDonald
February 18, 2011
To hear him tell it, Joe Mamo’s move from Ethiopia to North Dakota in 1981 was accidental.
Mamo’s father, Yenberber Mamo, was a public transit mogul who manufactured buses and ran the first fleet to provide service across Ethiopia. The operation made his father’s Mamo Kacha bus line a household name in the East African country. It provided a nice life for his family. But it rendered him distinctly unpopular with the Marxist junta that ruled Ethiopia between 1974 and 1991. The elder Mamo was jailed two or three times by the regime. Some of his property was confiscated. As his son approached draft age, the patriarch looked for ways to send him overseas.
That’s how Joe, at the age of 13, found himself attending Catholic boarding school in North Dakota.