Dujovne and Lopetegui reactivated an agreement that proposes compensation for the poor quality of the service. The loot of $ 35,000 million that is in we will see
By Claudio Mardones
20/03/2023 – 20,00hs
The versions about a landing of the State in the electrical distributor EDESUR, Currently operated by the Italian company ENEL. The firm closes a ruinous summer: to the wave of cuts in the metropolitan area, which also exposed EDENOR’s shortcomings, criminal complaints from different municipalities were added. There is also an ENRE plan for Congress to analyze removing the concession and Now another complaint has been added, very little known, which could imply a reparation payment of 7,000 pesos for each residential user. The case has been in the hands of federal judge María Eugenia Capuchetti for years.
The controversy revolves around the readjustment of the concession that the distributors signed in 2006 and was reactivated with the then Minister of Finance, Nicolás Dujovne, together with the Secretary of Energy, Gustavo Lopetegui and his partner of Renewable Resources and the National Electricity Market. , Juan Antonio Garade. The complaint against them, to which iProfesional agreed, was presented by the national deputy Rodolfo Tailhade From the Front of All. He is the head of the Justice Commission of the Lower House and a representative on the Council of the Magistracy. With this role, the legislator is one of the most rejected and feared by his peers in Together for Change.
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In this case, Taihlade denounced Lopetegui and Garade for considering them “participants and concealers” for “the crimes of embezzlement of public funds and abuse of authority”. This is how he got into two sensitive issues for the main opposition coalition, but especially for the PRO. He questioned Capuchetti for having this investigation “trodden on” for three years and recalled the breach of an adaptation of the concession that should have resulted in compensation for all users, because the distributors had not complied with the agreed quality of electrical service.
The origin of the dispute lies in the “Contractual Renegotiation Agreement Acts”, signed 17 years ago, which retroactively established “a transition period for the concession between January 6, 2002 and July 31, 2006 for EDENOR SA and July 1, 2006 for EDESUR SA”. That term was extended the following year by the Energy Secretariat in 2007, which established that it would be applicable until the “Comprehensive Technical Review” was implemented. Finally, that tariff schedule came into effect ten years later, as of February 1, 2017, when then-President Mauricio Macri launched the unfreezing of public service rates.
The key to the tensions between the State and the two distributors goes through two sensitive areas. Section 5.2 and 5.4 of the agreement minutes. In the first, “a quality regime was established for the provision of the service, and an average reference quality was determined consisting of the average of the quality indices for the provision of the service registered during the period of the years 2000-2003, expressed by indicators of frequency and duration of interruptions”.
In 5.4 too “It was established that the amounts of the sanctions could be destined by the concessionaire to the execution of additional investments to those foreseen”. This possibility could only be executable “as long as the concessionaire had managed to maintain a quality of service every six months, measured by indicators of frequency and duration of interruptions, higher than the average reference quality indices”.
If that did not happen, then “the sanctions had to be paid in accordance with the regime established in the concession contract, that is, crediting these sums to the users’ accounts.”
Offensive against Edesur: what does Tailhade’s complaint raise?
The complaint recalls that “EDENOR SA has only complied with the quality parameters in the twentieth semester of the concession (period from March to August 2006) and in the twenty-second semester (March to August 2007), while “EDESUR SA has only complied with the quality parameters in the twentieth semester (March to August 2006)”.
With so few periods of compliance with the agreed quality average “the amounts of the fines should have been paid to the users harmed by the actions of the concessionaires.” For the complainant, “The updated total of the fines would amount to 35 billion pesos (…) which would mean an accreditation of 7 thousand pesos per user. However, it seems that the Government has recognized – it is reiterated, without the intervention of the ENRE – the sum of 7 billion pesos as a debt for fines from both concessionaires. That is, approximately one thousand two hundred pesos per user,” Tailhade summarized in the letter.
The minutes of agreement were activated as of February 28, 2019, when the Nation transferred jurisdictional control of the electrical service to the province and the city of Buenos Aires.
It was signed by the then Minister of Finance, Nicolás Dujovne and the then Buenos Aires Governor María Eugenia Vidal and the mayor of Buenos Aires Horacio Rodríguez Larreta. In the “Agreement for the transfer of jurisdiction of the public electricity distribution service”, the three signatories considered “necessary that, within the framework of said transfer, a comprehensive solution is given to the pending claims between the National State and the concessionaires”.
According to the complainant, they acted “with the purpose of illegitimately benefiting the companies” and modified “unilaterally the destination of the fines that correspond to be accredited in the account of the individual users, without having competence for it”.
Tailhade echoed his complaint through a video. “A scam for users with the complicity of Macri,” she wrote.
For Tailhade “the magnitude of the abuse of power is clearly revealed if one analyzes that a tool such as fines, which, according to the provisions of the Concession Contract, had a specific purpose, which was to guide investments for the benefit of users, It ends up becoming a reward for companies when they are forgiven their payment with the excuse that they will be destined -justly- for investments”. They are the ones that he should have carried out previously and regardless of the sanction applied, because it is one of his primary obligations and to which he committed himself when signing said Contract”, maintains the complaint that is in the Capuchetti court and the federal prosecutor Franco intervenes. Picardi.
