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Our View: Opposition will fight opening up of electricity market

Efforts to open up the electricity market have been made unsuccessfully for years. Deadlines have been regularly missed while the top management of the Electricity Authority have been very adept at coming up with excuses for blocking or delaying the process. Cyprus, inevitably, is well behind the schedule set by the European Commission for the eventual opening of the market, but nobody seems very concerned, the political consensus being that the EAC monopoly must be maintained for as long as possible.

Time is running out and the government on Tuesday submitted three bills which set out the framework for a liberalised electricity market. Chairman of the House energy committee, Disy’s Kyriacos Hadjyiannis, said the bills would be forwarded for approval as soon as possible, even though his assurance has to be taken with a pinch of salt. Opposition parties that are at the beck and call of the unions, which have been frenziedly defending the monopoly, are very unlikely to show any sense of urgency.

Hadjiyiannis felt obliged to pander to the unions by reassuring them that nobody would be ‘victimised’ under the new state of affairs. It was an astonishing remark, indicative of the power the public sector unions wield. We should be told when an employee of a semi-governmental organisation was ever ‘victimised’. Even the so-called voluntary retirement schemes, put in place from time to time, offer a level of compensation that is beyond the wildest dreams of anyone in the private sector, with the exception of bank employees.

It would be very interesting to hear which SGO had ever victimised its employees? In fact it is the taxpayer that is always ‘victimised’ when these overstaffed organisations decide they want to reduce the number of grossly overpaid workers on their payroll. When the market opens up, the Transmission System Operator (TSO), which runs the power grid, will no longer be staffed by EAC workers, as is the case at present. The TSO is in fact staffed by EAC workers, because the unions would not allow it to hire its own workers despite it being, in theory, an independent body that has to serve all producers.

The opening up of the market that will bring some price competition and benefit consumers has been delayed so much because the unions, backed by the politicians, wanted to maintain the EAC monopoly. Ordinary people have had to carry on paying electricity rates that were among the highest in the EU for as long as possible, so that the fat cats of the EAC can carry on collecting their big pay cheques.

 

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