Duplicate invoices in the bank account. It is the latest unpleasant surprise that customers have received from the tiny Catalan distributor Eléctrica del Montsec, with a long history of complaints, disciplinary proceedings and fines for repeated irregularities, and whose intervention the National Markets and Markets Commission asked the Government to intervene a year ago. 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 that distributor concentrates its business. “The same invoice, the same number, has been passed through the bank twice.” There are also customers who have been charged much higher bills than normal, he says. “There are dozens of claims.”
This newspaper tried without success to contact the octogenarian businessman Antonio Soler, owner and administrator 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 receipts, Banco Santander. “We uploaded a shipment and for whatever reason it doubled; We realized it, 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 urged all affected subscribers to return one of the receipts.
The deputy mayor of Àger says that the efforts of recent months have not borne fruit, including a meeting that Soler did not attend, but rather his external advisor, who has no powers in the company. The service is “terrible” and they do “minimal maintenance, post incident, patch it and continue.” “Nothing has been resolved. There were meetings in Lleida, at the CNMC in Madrid, at the ministry, but there has been no progress or a solution,” says Cortasa, who participated in the last meeting in the capital with those responsible for the Ecological Transition.
“I understood that the last step depended on the ministry, on how it intervenes. It’s in your hands. The rest of us, neither the city council nor the Generalitat, have the power to act,” he says. There are three other municipalities affected. The process has mobilized other entities such as the Generalitat and the La Noguera Regional Council.
The Eléctrica del Montsec advisor insists that the “cuts and microcuts” that, he recognizes, his clients 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 ones, “there may be some point at which due to the power of the transformer, which is also the responsibility of Endesa, there is not enough energy.”
“Of the 54 border points that we have”, the connections between the different networks, “there are 17 in which some technical and aesthetic anomaly had to be corrected that can be classified as serious or less serious, but do not affect the distribution of medium voltage energy,” explains Triay. He claims to have “no communication” of a request from the CNMC to disqualify them.
On October 23, 2023, the CNMC sent the ministry a sanctioning file against Eléctrica del Montsec for “very serious” violations of the Electricity Sector Law. He requested that the Council of Ministers impose “accessory” sanctions on the company, provided for in article 68 of the electricity law, such as disabling it or suspending its activities for up to three years.
The file, sector sources explain, proposed a new sanction for the company and a one-year disqualification. The CNMC limited itself to processing it “following a management assignment” 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,” which does not comment. According to sources in the process, the State Attorney’s Office analyzes how to address an unprecedented situation.
Some sources point out that the legal fit is not easy, since many powers related to distribution depend on the autonomous communities, a regulated monopoly. On the table is that the activity of this company be assumed by Endesa or the Catalan public electricity company created two years ago, L´ Energètica. .
In parallel with this disqualification proposal, Eléctrica del Montsec is accumulating disciplinary proceedings and fines. The last one was reported to the CNMC by the General Directorate of Energy of the Generalitat Catalunya on April 29 for another alleged serious violation of the sectoral law, not maintaining the facilities in adequate conservation conditions.
In the summer of 2023, a complaint from the mayor of Àger reached the CNMC about 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, indicating that “We only act in response to repairs or, on rare occasions, due to pressure from the aforementioned council.”
The history of non-compliance is long, although the CNMC sanctions have been of little relevance since they are applied based on the company’s billing. In 2020, the last year in which it presented accounts in the Commercial Registry, it did not reach half a million.
Already in 2016, Competition sanctioned it for not submitting the purchase offers necessary to develop marketing activities. In June 2018, after residents of the area demanded fire risk measures and denounced the company’s lack of investment, the CNMC began an inspection in which it verified that they declared they were owners of third-party high-voltage assets, charging the all light consumers. It also detects that they sell electricity directly to end users, something prohibited to distributors; that they do not buy the energy they supply; and that they do not communicate consumption to Red Eléctrica, which prevents calculating the deviations generated by the energy consumed that is not acquired.
“Captive” clients
Another inspection started in October 2019 detects that they lack a measurement concentrator, the device to which the consumption of all the meters in a distributor’s area must be sent. This irregularity, according to a source in the sector, has not been resolved, and prevents any company from being able to read the consumption of customers in that area. That is why Eléctrica del Montsec still has that portfolio of 1,000 “captive” subscribers despite its history of abandonment and complaints.
In November 2022, another inspection reveals that they do not declare “a considerable part of the energy” they supply to the CNMC for tolls and charges. All of these irregularities lead the CNMC to initiate another sanctioning file in May 2023 for not installing the secondary concentrator, nor sending data to the System Operator, and failing to comply with the obligation to manage the verifications of the meters. That is the file that was sent to the ministry a year ago.
In parallel, the owner of the company was accused by the Prosecutor’s Office of an alleged “deliberate” aggravated fraud of 1.5 million to the electrical network for these events. In the trial held in February, the Public Ministry asked for Soler to be sentenced to seven years in prison, a fine of 4.5 million for the company and compensation of 1.5 million. It came to nothing: the Provincial Court of Lleida determined in June that it was an administrative infraction already sanctioned, and not a crime.
According to the ruling to which Segre had access, no “detriment to Red Eléctrica Española was proven, in any case the injured being the millions of final consumers to whom the energy losses are passed on, not only to the accused entity, but of the entire national market. And this given the way in which the electricity market is structured.” Soler was acquitted.
In 2020, Competition already fined them another 63,000 euros for another serious violation, not separating their distribution and marketing activities. The resolution explained 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 was not yet mandatory to have separate activities.
The analysis of the inspection accounting verified “that the real estate that appears in the company’s assets represents a significant percentage of the total fixed assets” and that they are not used to distribute electricity, since “it does not have customer service offices.” the users and the corporate headquarters of the company (place where the inspection was carried out) is a home.”
Antonio Soler is linked to real estate or tourism and hospitality businesses. The latest rumor in Àger is that it is buying land in the Caribbean. His external advisor does not know. The businessman appears linked to a company in the Dominican Republic, Eleccaribbean Company. It is dedicated to importing electronic devices and batteries.
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