After petitioning the courts to prevent nine Edesur executives from leaving the country, this Four corporate offices were raided on Thursday. It’s because of the power outages in mid-February. There, Edesur stopped the service on the advice of the system administrator -Sacme-, and left 300,000 customers without supply for a few hours. Guido Lorenzino, Ombudsman of the province of Buenos Aires, initiated a judgment against the distributor.
The interruption “order” was at the Edesur headquarters, in via San José. And Edesur had no problem providing it, since it claims to have written and audio details of that instruction. However, the four raids helped to give more spectacularity to the Government’s pressure on society.
Since the appointment of Jorge Ferraresi, also mayor of Avellaneda, as controller, there have already been two meetings between that politician and the Edesur authorities.
On Wednesday night Walter Martello – controller of the regulatory body (Enre) – presented a petition to justice to prevent nine company executives from leaving the country. Curious one of the paragraphs of the presentation: equates the distributor’s executives with those who perpetrated the attacks on the Israeli embassy and the AMIA, with more than a hundred dead.
Martello asks that the cuts in the first half of March be investigated. “They have been put into practice by the highest authorities of the Edesur company, where some of them are Italian citizens, but all have a privileged economic, financial and social position which would allow them to flee the country and evade accountability before justice and fundamentally in front of Argentine society,” the letter reads.
“Justice cannot delay any moment in making a decision like this, otherwise it could happen that they have fled the country like what happened then with the attack on the Embassy (of Israel) and Mutua AMIA, where the suspects were able to travel abroad without any problems and were never brought to justice,” he says.
Ferraresi’s first steps in Edesur surprised the company. The controller promised it he would get the money to carry out the work towards winter. When temperatures drop, slums that do not have a gas network are often connected to electricity lines for heating. This usually causes interruptions, because connections are often not supervised by Edesur.
Edesur understands that the Argentine state violates the regulatory framework in which the public service concession is exercised. “It has only been applied in two years from 2002 to today”, they remark in the company. They understand that they are asking for “investments” but that the counterparty is not authorizing the rate hikes needed to make those disbursements.
The government authorized Edesur and Edenor a make a $400 increase in utility bills from April. And $800 from June. This will be for the delivery of your service. Its incidence on the ballot is just 20%.
In parallel, the executive branch is encouraging more people to register in the grant register (RASE). There must be families who feel they do not have enough purchasing power to pay the full cost of electricity. That section (the cost) makes up 60% of the bill in Buenos Aires.
There’s a 35% of families who have not registered continue to receive grants. It is calculated that there is a percentage (about 20%) who do not want subsidies. But there are also more than a million families who may need it, for example because they earn less than $500,000 a month and have not gone through the respective process.
In the centre, the Italian Enel has 75% of Edesur for sale. In the Frente de Todos they see Nicolás Caputo (the friend of former president Mauricio Macri) as an interested party. On the other hand, in the opposition they speculate that the company could end up in the hands of Cristóbal López. The Patagonian businessman had an interest in Edesur during the second term of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (2011-2015). It is also talked about some bankers with arrival at the Minister of Economy, Sergio Massa, but he still would not have asked the Italians for a price.
Source: Clarin
