(Podgorica, 17 July 2013) – While the Podgorica Aluminum Combine (KAP) is allowed to use electricity without paying a cent for the past year, citizens are once again facing an electricity price hike. This increase is designed to satisfy the appetites of Italian companies A2A and Terna, which effectively run the Electric Power Company of Montenegro (EPCG) and Montenegro’s transmission system.
It’s clear that the latest decision of the Regulatory Agency for Energy (RAE) to increase the electricity price by 2.3% for households will be another hard hit on the living standards of the poorest citizens. In the past year citizens have already had to face the new ‘euro for euro’ tax, frozen pensions, a crisis tax on earnings, higher VAT charges, etc.
MANS is intensively investigated the latest RAE deception, since nearly all of the regulator’s previous decisions have been approved before the Administrative Court even though it has shown that it has violated the law in the past (thus openly aligning itself with the profit motives of the Italian partners in the EPCG and the Montenegrin transmission system).
It’s well known that it’s largely thanks to the RAE that electricity import and export agreements are till this kept secret, while officials of regional governments continue to state that it is an “open secret” that there has been corruption in the purchase of electricity between Montenegro, Serbia and the Serb Republic in Bosnia.
Particularly relevant in this regard is the role of regional energy traders Vuk Hamovic and Vojin Lazarevic, from whose companies (ETF and Rudnap) our state energy company has been purchasing nearly half of the energy it imports.
Similarly, the EPCG continues to hold tens of millions of euros from its recapitalization. Instead of investing this money in necessary improvements, it’s holding the money in the First Bank in order to enable the bank’s liquidity. As a result, citizens are paying for enormous losses on the transmission network, which has an impact on increasingly high electricity prices.
We want to remind you that the newest strategic partner, A2A, was exclusively brought to Montenegro ostensibly to invest capital in the modernization of the energy company, advancing the country’s infrastructure and reducing network losses. However, the only ones benefiting from the money brought in by A2A has been the First Bank, which continues to use the money to this day.
At the same time, behind the backs of tax-payers, new electricity subsidies are being announced for KAP, even after it has failed to pay its own bills and the state stole energy from the European interconnection for the Podgorica firm.
It’s unacceptable to increase the price of electrical energy and introduce new impositions, while the same citizens are expected to pay off the multi-million euro electricity debts of KAP and other debts of its Russian owners (which to this day it hasn’t been established whether they were fictional and for what purpose they were used).
All of this demonstrates that the Government of Milo Djukanovic intends to further burden the country’s citizens in order to finance the enrichment of domestic and foreign tycoons.
