German Finance Minister Klingbeil says oil majors take advantage of this situation. We need to intervene in the energy market

Ministerial talk of intervening in energy markets when oil prices spike has a long pedigree across European episodes of this kind, and the usual sequence is well established: rhetoric about windfall rents and profiteering comes first, followed by windfall taxes, price caps, or anti-abuse powers granted to regulators, with the actual instruments typically arriving well after the initial jawboning. The accusation that majors are exploiting the situation is standard political framing in such episodes and has historically preceded profit levies rather than direct commodity price intervention, which matters because the transmission differs: a windfall tax hits the integrated producers' and refiners' equity valuations and domestic retail margins, while caps or subsidy mechanisms work through fiscal cost and retail pricing. A finance minister carrying this message, rather than an energy or economy ministry counterpart, signals the fiscal angle is live, and prior form in comparable episodes is that treasury involvement raises the probability of revenue-raising measures over structural market redesign. The detail worth drawing out is the distinction between targeting upstream profits, which tends to be domestically limited in effect since the majors book much of their earnings elsewhere, and targeting the domestic downstream and retail chain, which is where national intervention actually bites. The follow-ons are whether the language hardens into a concrete proposal, whether it is coordinated at European level or unilateral, and how refiners and fuel retailers trade against the integrated names. As rhetoric alone, the signal is directional rather than actionable.