The electrical expert Bernardo Castellanos yesterday minimized the impact of the proposal by the president of the Unified Council of Electricity Companies (CUE), Celso Marranzini, that irregular customers receive a six-month grace period to normalize their status.
He explained that the responsibility of the CUE and the electricity distribution companies (Ede) is to provide all electricity consumers with a meter and, as soon as they do that, they are standardized, they are assigned the customer code or NIC.
“Whoever commits fraud and steals electricity is already normalized, has an accountant and NIC,” he clarified.
He pointed out that fraud occurs when you have a meter and you intentionally evade consumption through a derivation or hook, which is why it is not recorded in the meter.
He considered that the effort should be to provide 800 thousand users with meters and they automatically become customers and, therefore, their consumption becomes metered, billed and can be collected.
He indicated that last year they installed 636 thousand meters, according to Marranzini, but the losses increased.
He explained that the price of a counter ranges between $20 for the simplest ones and $100 for the most expensive ones. If the 800,000 missing meters were purchased for 100 dollars, the amount would be US$80 million, much less than the US$4,778 million allocated to the electricity deficit since 2021.
