All five faulty generators at the Teknecik power station outside Kyrenia have been repaired as of Friday morning, the north’s ‘prime minister’ Unal Ustel said.

Speaking to reporters, Ustel touched on the dramatic scenes witnessed at Teknecik as trade unionists attempted to block the entry of repairmen, who are employees of Turkish private energy company Aksa, into the publicly run power station site.

“There was a scuffle with the union, and the union’s leader was arrested and gave the necessary statements to the police,” he said.

“No one has the right to leave this population without electricity. Five generators were repaired in the early hours of this morning, and five are currently in operation. We are now on top of the situation at the Teknecik power station.”

However, Ustel’s overnight adversary, the north’s electricity authority Kib-Tek’s employees’ trade union El-Sen leader Ahmet Tugcu, said on Friday afternoon that Ustel was not telling the truth when he declared his mission accomplished.

“We woke up to another big lie. The prime minister said in front of the cameras that he had five generators at Teknecik repaired. This is not the truth. Teknecik workers have been trying to create something out of nothing with a superhuman effort since last night, but due to the fuel problem and the lack of spare parts, the machines cannot be fully commissioned,” he said.

He added that as of midday, only two generators are fully operational.

“Keeping all the generators running at the same time is not possible due to the mud-quality fuel and the missing spare parts. We call on the prime minister once again to be serious and get busy with his actual job. He should stop talking nonsense and lying to the people and take the necessary steps to find a permanent solution.

“We expect actions befitting the gravity of the position he is in. Forget about those who make a show and cut corners. We are minding our own business. They are mismanaging us and sabotaging us with bad fuel, while we stubbornly clean up and repair what is broken, working day and night,” he said.

He added that Kib-Tek “will not end up like KTHY”, the north’s former airline which went bankrupt in 2010.

Ustel himself had raised the possibility of “sabotage” as a potential reason behind the damaged machinery and black smoke billowing out of the chimney at Teknecik.

“Never in history has so much black smoke come out of steam turbines. Never in history have five generators stopped and malfunctioned at once,” he had said earlier in the day, adding that the police would be launching an investigation into the matter.

Overnight, video footage of a face-to-face confrontation at Teknecik appeared to show Ustel shouting I will pull the rug from under you” at Tugcu, while newspaper Yeni Duzen and opposition political party CTP leader Tufan Erhurman said Ustel had called Tugcu a “bastard”.

Newspaper Kibris reported that Tugcu had physically assaulted Ustel, though the fact that he was released without charge just three hours after his arrest suggests this is unlikely to have been the case.