“We will have to pass on the higher fuel prices to our clients,” Karlheinz Schmidt, the head of the BGL road hauliers’ association, told German daily Der Tagesspiegel according to an advance excerpt.

He said clients of BGL, which represents 11,000 freight transport companies, should count on price increase “of 10 percent this year still.”

Schmidt said many smaller companies who will not be able to recuperate their rising fuel expenditure from their clients risked bankruptcy.

“Five to six percent of companies will go under this year—that is twice as many as in 2007,” he predicted.

Spanish and Portuguese truckers have staged crippling strikes to demand government help to cope with high fuel costs caused by rocketing oil prices, which earlier this month reached almost $140 a barrel.