BPL cannot collect more than $100m – so who owes the rest to the power company?
Nassau, Bahamas – For some odd reason the BPL saga has taken a new twist, all orchestrated by the Free National Movement and begun early in the week when the Minister for Works Desmond Bannister suggested to the Tribune that he found an elite list of customers with “Do not shut off “ orders.
Now this is interesting because the Minister told the papers he had not seen the list, but days later the paper, which was informed of the developments by the Minister, later produced a short list showing the PLPs who owe money with BPL.
From our source deep inside the Corporation, at least four sitting FNM MPs owe BPL more than $7,000 and have failed to have their lights disconnected. Three of them were never named in the FNM circulated list published in the Tribune.
We at Bahamas Press, though, will be responsible and adhere to the codes that govern privacy, which protects citizens from such public shaming.
Had the Tribune and Minister Bannister wanted to be honest with the public, they would highlight the following facts:
1) BPL’s accounts receivables have hovered at around $100 million over the past several years. Here are consumers of every political persuasion who cannot pay their debts with the corporation and its growing receivables have placed serious strain on the corporation.
2) Back in 2013, BEC’s former chairman revealed how some 6,000 Bahamians were disconnected, leaving thousands in darkness as a result of their inability to pay their high electricity bills. So how come only 9 former MPs ended up in the newspapers, shamed by the Minister’s list?
3) BPL was a construct of the former Administration, which intended to reduce electricity costs for consumers, restructure the debt, and better upgrade its systems, particularly after the purchase of two faulty generators by the Ingraham government.
4) KPMG provided the expert advice to create these transformations for the former Government in order to select the right company to manage and modernize BEC.
5) It was upon that advice, aided by the US Embassy proposals, which led to the selection of PowerSecure to manage BPL.
6) No one can deny that their electricity bills since May 2012 have reduced by more than 40% in some cases and by 50% in other cases. However, since May 2017,for some strange reason electricity costs have doubled!
Citizens must wonder, though, how operatives in the Accounts Department oversaw the inside rip-off some $7 million dollars by the Corporation and to this date not one staffer at BPL has been brought before the courts.
Journalists in the country should first get the facts before they parade their selected few in the papers. They should tell the whole story and not hide what led to the tragic end of PowerSecure.
And now that we have seen how some former PLP MPs owe the corporation just around $180,000, perhaps we will equally get to see how many FNMs are a part of that $99,820,000 outstanding receivables BPL still – to this day – struggles to collect from residents.
We report yinner decide!
