Mexico City.- In a meeting in the National Palace, in September 2020, the war began between the Government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador and the Spanish company Iberdrola.
In one of the halls of the historic venue, the man from Tabasco harassed the executives of the transnational company and accused them of having offended Mexico by turning former President Felipe Calderón into “one more of his employees.”
In response –according to AMLO himself–, the directors would have disqualified the President for acting as “a populist” when taking a turn in energy policy.
30 months later, the same actors, in the same room, shook hands, posed for a photo and sealed a $6 billion transaction.
Iberdrola agreed to sell 13 power plants, equivalent to 80 percent of its assets for the generation of electricity in Mexico, and to concentrate its efforts on the production of renewable energy.
The Government closed the business to keep the facilities that operate with fossil fuels and positioned a speech to present a commercial transaction as a “patriotic achievement” and an advance on the “energy sovereignty” route, that is, “a new nationalization” of the electric sector.
On Wednesday, April 5, the President was questioned three times about the way in which the agreement with Iberdrola was built, a company that he had “sent to hell”, accusing it of corruption, influence peddling, of seeing the Country as a land of conquest, to implement campaigns against it and to do dirty business with clean energy.
In response, the President limited himself to describing the options he put on the table: “There will be no expropriation, but we are going to look for the CFE, a public company, to keep 54 percent of the market and you are going to keep 46 “.
The message was captured by Iberdrola.
“We have understood that there is a policy of your Government and it has led us to seek a situation that is good for the people of Mexico and that meets the interests of our shareholders,” said Ignacio Sánchez Galán, Global President of the company.
At noon on Tuesday, April 4, Iberdrola reported, in Spain, on the signing of an agreement for almost 6 billion dollars with Mexico Infraestrucutre Partners (MIP) –a joint investment fund between Pattern Energy Group, of Canada; EXI Renewables, from Mexico; and Nacional Financiera (Nafin)–, to sell 13 power generation plants in the country.
An hour later, the President published a video on his networks to announce and celebrate the purchase of 12 combined cycle plants and one wind power plant.
In his speech, he referred to the operation as a “new nationalization of the electrical industry” and presumed that the plants will be operated by the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE), without clarifying that the property will not remain in the hands of the State, but will be will keep private.
The Ministry of Finance reported that the acquisition was made through a national investment vehicle with the majority participation of the National Infrastructure Fund (Fonadin), managed by MIP, and bank financing.
He specified that this transaction does not imply increasing the budgetary public debt, as it is carried out through Fonadin, in a vehicle outside the balance sheet of the public sector.
After consulting sector specialists, REFORMA revealed that the plants sold by Iberdrola were expensive because they are old facilities, whose useful life will expire in a few years.
