After requests to justice so that nine Edesur executives could not leave the country, this
Thursday four company headquarters were raided.
It's because of the power outages in mid-February.
There, Edesur interrupted the service due to an instruction from the system administrator -Sacme-, and left
300,000 clients without supply for a few hours.
Guido Lorenzino, Ombudsman for the province of Buenos Aires, filed a
lawsuit against the distributor.
The interruption "order" was located at the Edesur headquarters, on San José street.
And Edesur had no problem supplying it, since it says it has written and audio details of that instruction.
However, the four raids helped
make the government's pressure on the company more spectacular.
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 - comptroller of the regulatory body (Enre) - presented a request to the justice to prevent nine company executives from leaving the country.
One of the paragraphs of the presentation is curious:
it equates the executives of the distributor with those who perpetrated the attacks against the Israeli embassy and the AMIA,
with more than a hundred deaths.
Martello asks that the cuts in the first half of March be investigated.
"They were put into practice by the highest authorities of the Edesur company, where some of them are Italian citizens, but all of them hold a privileged economic, financial and social position that would allow them to flee the country and evade responsibility before justice and fundamentally
before
the Argentine society ”, marks the letter.
"Justice cannot delay any moment in making a decision like this, otherwise it could happen that they left the country
as happened at the time with the attack on the Embassy (of Israel) and Mutual AMIA,
where the suspects could travel abroad without any problem and have never been brought to justice," he says.
Ferraresi's first steps in Edesur had surprised the company.
The comptroller promised that
he would get money to carry out works towards the winter.
When temperatures drop, slums that do not have a gas network are often connected to power lines for heating.
This usually causes interruptions, because the connections are often not supervised by Edesur.
Edesur understands that the Argentine State
fails to comply with the regulatory framework
in which the provision of the public services concession is carried out.
"It was only applied in two years from 2002 to now," they remark in the company.
They understand that they are asking for "investments", but that the counterpart does not authorize the rate increases necessary to make those disbursements.
The Government authorized Edesur and Edenor to
make an increase of $400 in the bills since April.
And $800 since June.
That will be for the provision of your service.
Its incidence in the ballot is barely 20%.
In parallel, the Executive Power encourages more people to register in the subsidy registry (RASE).
There must be households that consider that they do not have enough purchasing power to pay the electricity cost in full.
That section (the cost) makes up 60% of the bill in Buenos Aires.
There are
35% of households that did not sign up
to continue receiving subsidies.
It is estimated that there is a percentage (around 20%) that does not want subsidies.
But there are also more than a million households that could need them -for example, because they earn less than $500,000 a month- and did not go through the respective process.
In the middle, 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 assume 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).
There is also talk of
a banker who has reached the Minister of Economy, Sergio Massa,
but he has not yet asked the Italians for a price.
