By Lindsay Dentlinger
The City of Cape Town is threatening to liquidate its subsidiary regional electricity distribution company RED1 if the National Energy Regulator of SA (Nersa) extends a supply and distribution licence to the company.
The stalemate over who will control the city's supply and distribution of electricity from January 2007 is expected to be broken in Pretoria on Friday, with a decision by Nersa's licensing committee.
Nersa board secretary Sandile Ntanzi said the board would make a decision based on arguments put to it at public hearings late last week, as well as legislation.
The city has pulled out all the stops to get its licence back, hiring senior counsel to tell Nersa that it could not pump R10-million a year into RED1 while the supporting legal framework was not in place.
Continues Below ↓
In its submission, the city said it could be forced to dissolve RED1 if Nersa found in favour of extending RED1's temporary licence, which it has held since July, 2005.
Eskom, EDI Holdings and RED1 argued in favour of RED1 retaining the licence for another six months.
But the city, as its shareholder, said it had not given RED1 permission to apply for an extension in the wake of developments that meant REDs could not be established as municipal entities.
Mayoral committee member for finance Ian Neilson said on Monday that the city did not want to comment on its back-up plan, should it fail in its bid this week.
He said the city would not comment until the final decision had been made.
This comes amid a scathing attack from Minister of Minerals and Energy Buyelwa Sonjica over the city's intimations that it wanted to pull out of the country's pilot electricity restructuring deal.
Sonjica said that if the city chose to withdraw from the process, it would not stop the restructuring of the rest of the industry.
Continues...
|
StumbleUpon
Reddit
Digg
Delicious
Newsvine
Facebook
muti
Twitter
