Duplicate bills on bank account. This is the latest unpleasant surprise that customers are receiving from the small Catalan distributor Eléctrica del Montsec, with a long history of complaints, disciplinary procedures and fines for repeated irregularities, and whose intervention has asked the government to intervened a year ago. there is the Competition (CNMC).
“In recent months they have sent double and inflated invoices,” says Jordi Cortasa, first deputy mayor of Àger (Lleida), a small town of 582 inhabitants in the Catalan foothills where this distributor concentrates its activity. “The same invoice, the same number, was sent to the bank twice.” There are also customers who have had to pay much higher bills than normal, he says. “There are dozens of complaints.”
This newspaper tried without success to contact octogenarian businessman Antonio Soler, owner and director of Eléctrica del Montsec. His “external advisor” Guillermo Triay limits the problem to 10% of his 1,000 subscribers. He attributes it to an error by the bank that directs the revenue, Banco Santander. “We uploaded a shipment and for some reason it doubled; We realized this, we notified the bank and there was a human error on their part: instead of canceling it, they authorized it. He assures on the phone that they have asked all affected subscribers to return one of the receipts.
The deputy mayor of Àger claims that the efforts of recent months have not borne fruit, including a meeting attended not by Soler, but by his external advisor, who has no power in the business. The service is “terrible” and they do “minimal maintenance, report the incident, fix it and move on.” “Nothing is resolved. There have been meetings in Lleida, at the CNMC in Madrid, at the ministry, but there has been no progress or solution,” says Cortasa, who participated in the last meeting in the capital with those responsible for the transition ecological.
“I understood that the last step depended on the ministry, on the way in which it intervened. It’s in your hands. The rest of us, neither the municipality nor the Generalitat, have the power to act,” he says. Three other municipalities are concerned. The process mobilized other entities such as the Generalitat and the Regional Council of La Noguera.
The Eléctrica del Montsec advisor insists on the fact that the “cuts and microcuts” which, he admits, his customers suffer, are not his responsibility, “but rather that of the upstream distributor”, Endesa, dominant in Catalonia, and its medium voltage line. In his company’s low-voltage installations, “there may be a moment when, due to the power of the transformer, which is also Endesa’s responsibility, there is not enough energy.”
“Of the 54 border points that we have”, the connections between the different networks, “there are 17 in which it was necessary to correct certain technical and aesthetic anomalies which can be classified as serious or less serious, but which do not affect not the distribution of medium voltage energy,” explains Triay. He claims to have “no communication” of a request from the CNMC aimed at disqualifying them.
On October 23, 2023, the CNMC sent the ministry a file for sanctions against Eléctrica del Montsec for “very serious” violations of the law on the electricity sector. He requested that the Council of Ministers impose “incidental” sanctions on the company, provided for in Article 68 of the Electricity Law, such as its decommissioning or suspension of its activities for a period of up to up to three years.
The filing, industry sources explained, proposed a new sanction for the company and a one-year disqualification. The CNMC limited itself to processing it “following a management mission” and sending it to the ministry to resolve it, say official sources from the CNMC: “It is a file whose resolution corresponds to the ministry”, who does not comment. According to sources close to the matter, the public prosecutor’s office is analyzing how to deal with an unprecedented situation.
Some sources point out that the legal situation is not easy, since many powers related to distribution depend on the autonomous communities, a regulated monopoly. It is expected that its activity will be taken over by Endesa or by the Catalan public electricity company created two years ago, L´ Energètica. .
Alongside this proposed disqualification, the company is accumulating disciplinary procedures and fines. The latest was communicated to the CNMC by the General Directorate of Energy of the Generalitat Catalunya on April 29, for another alleged serious violation of sectoral law, non-compliance with the obligation to maintain the installations in conditions of adequate conservation.
In the summer of 2023, a complaint from the mayor of Àger reached the CNMC concerning the serious state of the municipality’s networks and the “precarious situation of the electrical infrastructure, on which no maintenance or modernization has been carried out for years, stating that “We only act in response to repairs or, on rare occasions, under pressure from the aforementioned council.”
The history of non-compliance is long, although the CNMC sanctions have been of little importance since they are applied on the basis of the company’s turnover, which in 2020, the last year in during which it presented its accounts to the commercial register, did not reach half a turnover. million. Already in 2016, Competition had sanctioned it for not having submitted the purchase offers necessary for the development of marketing activities.
In June 2018, after residents of the area demanded fire risk measures and reported the company’s fault, the CNMC launched an inspection during which it verified that they declared ownership of third party high voltage assets, billing all residents for this light. consumers. It also detects that they sell electricity directly to end users, which is prohibited for distributors; that they do not buy the energy they provide; and that they do not communicate consumption to Red Eléctrica, which prevents the calculation of the differences generated by the energy consumed which is not acquired.
“Captive” clientele
Another inspection started in October 2019 detected that they were missing a measurement concentrator, the device to which the consumption of all the meters in a distributor zone should be sent. An irregularity which, according to a source in the sector, has not been resolved and prevents any company from being able to read customer consumption in this area. This is why Eléctrica del Montsec still has this portfolio of 1,000 “captive” subscribers despite its history of abandonments and complaints.
In November 2022, another inspection revealed that they did not declare “a considerable part of the energy” they supplied to the CNMC for tolls and charges. All these irregularities led the CNMC to open another sanctions file in May 2023 for non-installation of the secondary concentrator, nor sending data to the System Operator, and non-compliance with the obligation to manage meter verifications. . These are the irregularities that were reported to the ministry a year ago.
At the same time, the owner of the company was accused by the prosecution of an alleged “deliberate” aggravated fraud of 1.5 million to the electricity network during these events. During the trial held in February, he asked for a seven-year prison sentence for Soler, a fine of 4.5 million for the company and compensation of 1.5 million. This came to nothing: the Lleida Provincial Court determined in June that it was an administrative offense already punished and not a crime.
According to the judgment to which Segre had access, no “damage to Red Eléctrica Española has been proven, in any case the injured being the millions of end consumers to whom the energy losses are passed on, not only to the accused entity , but on the business. the entire national market. And this, taking into account the way in which the electricity market is structured.” Soler was acquitted.
In 2020, Competition already imposed an additional fine of 63,000 euros on them for another serious infringement, without separating their distribution and marketing activities. The resolution explains that Eléctrica del Montsec “dedicates itself to three different activities through a single legal entity”: real estate, distribution and marketing of electricity, according to its statutes, which date back to 1991, when it It was not yet mandatory to have separate entities. activities.
The analysis of the inspection accounting verified “that the real estate assets which appear in the company’s assets represent a significant percentage of the total fixed assets” and that they are not used to distribute electricity, because “it does not have customer service offices.” users and the company’s registered office (place where the inspection was carried out) is a domicile.
Antonio Soler is linked to real estate or tourism and hospitality businesses. The latest rumor in Àger is that she is buying land in the Caribbean. He doesn’t know it. The businessman appears linked to a Dominican Republic company, Eleccaribbean Company. It is dedicated to the import of electronic devices and batteries.
