By Angelos Anastasiou
THE House watchdog committee has formally requested the semi-government power company EAC to provide answers to questions of mismanagement and squandering of funds, as raised by the Auditor General in her annual report for 2012 and during a previous committee session in January this year.
But an EAC official has cited underhanded scheming by the committee chairman that will simply delay providing the necessary answers.
In the letter, addressed to the newly-appointed EAC head Othonas Theodoulou, the committee’s president and DISY MP Giorgos Georgiou reminded the EAC chairman of his legal obligation to submit any and all evidence and documents as requested by the House and lists eight questions to which answers are required.
A detailed report regarding the construction of the Authority’s new regional offices – which were completed in 2012 after a delay of over ten months – budgeted at €6m but ended up costing €20m, is the first item requested.
Some 12,000 wooden utility poles, purchased by the EAC in 2005 without meeting specifications, have been placed, resulting in the need to replace them at a substantial cost. The watchdog committee’s letter asked for all information related to the decision to buy the poles.
A storage warehouse, constructed by the EAC in Polis Chrysochous in 2008 at a cost of €7.5m, remains unutilised to date, and the committee wants an analytical report on the project history.
The watchdog committee also requested information with regard to the EAC’s lease of a storage warehouse in Dherynia, Famagusta, until 2019 at a monthly cost of €4,000 with no get-out clause, which was subsequently deemed unfit for use and turned into a car-park.
Legal advice to the authority, outsourced to the same law firm since 2008 at a cost of €500,000 annually without revisions to the original agreement, also came under the committee’s scrutiny.
The EAC board’s action plan on replacing long-outdated electricity meters with modern ones was also requested.
Some 50 fixed-term contract employees, made permanent by the EAC at an annual cost of €1.3m, were the object of another point raised by the committee, which asked for the criteria and procedure followed in the decision to render them permanent.
Finally, the committee asked the EAC’s board to look into the specifications required in tenders for the supply of urea – a substance used in electricity production to reduce emissions – so that more suppliers can compete and offer lower prices, as during the period 2009 to 2013, a single supplier was paid roughly €5m for a urea supply deal.
Kostas Gavrielides, spokesman for the EAC, said that the power utility will answer the committee’s letter, but added that when these issues were first aired – in January 2014 – the EAC had assured the committee that it could provide satisfactory explanations, pointing out that the letter containing the committee’s questions was only received last week and hinting at foul play by the committee’s president.
“These issues first came up after the January committee session by Mr Georgiou, but not during it”, Gavrielides said, implying that Georgiou had purposefully kept the issues to himself during the meeting with the EAC delegation, only to come out – all guns blazing – right after the meeting before the press.
“From the first moment, we had said that we can provide the answers they were after, once we received a letter listing all their questions in writing – but the letter only came last week.”
In addition to lambasting Georgiou’s “inappropriate” behaviour, Gavrielides also criticised the committee for falling short on accuracy.
“The letter is full of inaccurate assertions and incorrect figures, which would indicate poor research – still, the EAC is in a position to provide answers”, he concluded.
