Abra lawmaker seeks DoE help in power coop’s woes

February 10, 2018 Provincial

BAGUIO CITY – The energy department is being urged to help Abra Electric Cooperative (Abreco) shed off its fiscal woes especially its impending suspension from the wholesale electricity spot market (WESM). 
Administration lawmaker Joseph Bernos of Abra via House Resolution 1661 co-authored by 1-CARE Party-List representative Carlos Uybarreta,  called on the DoE to halt the Philippine Electricity Market Corporation (PEMC) from suspending the participation of Abreco from the electricity market, which according to the legislators, poses a huge problem for Abra electric consumers.
“The agency’s intervention is badly needed to assure the people of Abra that their households and livelihood will continue to receive electricity,” Rep. Bernos said, while reiterating that “electricity is an indispensable need to light our homes and to keep businesses in operation.”
The lawmaker is certain that interruption of electricity supply will have adverse and damaging effects for the welfare of the Abra people.
“Should it stop, we are risking not only a long-time province-wide blackout, but also the devastation of the local economy,” Bernos believed.
“Think of the schools, hospitals, and local businesses that will be crippled.”
Yet, Rep. Bernos sternly stood that the DoE intervention will not be an absolution of Abreco and its management team from the wrongdoings that piled up through the years.   “Of course, they still have to be held accountable for the outstanding problems Abreco faces,” Bernos said. “They are still not off the hook.”
The piled up fiscal woes, current Abreco general manager Loreto Seares Jr. however said, could be traced back to the cooperative’s mismanagement in the past.
An Abreco consumer has just recently filed before the Ombudsman graft and corruption charges against former officials of Abreco, officials of the National Electrification Administration (NEA) and others involved in a supposedly “ghost” multi-million peso dam project that until now is being paid even if it did not materialize.
Seares Jr. had been blaming the NEA for not aiding the cooperative even as it had long been seeking reimbursement for its completed sitio and barangay electrification programs out from its own shallow pockets that has piled all the more its fiscal problems. ACE ALEGRE / ABN