2023-09-27 09:50:21
The Ministry of Energy and Water announced that it was able to obtain an opinion from the Legislation and Consultation Commission, allowing citizens to pay electricity bills in cash dollars or in Lebanese pounds, according to the desire of each subscriber. Noting that the Ministry had requested – for this purpose – the Authority’s opinion on this mechanism since 09/20/2023.
The Ministry explained that the implementation of the mechanism requires the issuance of a decision by the Board of Directors of the Electricité du Liban Corporation. This is what the Electricity Corporation is currently working on preparing. This will allow the Foundation to address its financing problems in hard currency. Noting that the institution announced that it has reached the stage of financial balance, after the recent tariff hike, it is unable to transfer the proceeds of invoices from the Lebanese pound to the US dollar through the Bank of Lebanon, due to the lack of liquidity at the bank.
Although the mechanism referred to by the Ministry is voluntary, and not mandatory, it paves the way for the dollarization of electricity bill collection in the next stage, by raising the approved exchange rate for paying bills in pounds, in order to push subscribers to pay bills in cash dollars. For example, the Electricity Corporation currently prices kilowatts and fixed fees in dollars, while it adopts an exchange rate of 103 thousand pounds against the dollar to issue its bills in pounds, which is 14% higher than the actual exchange rate in the parallel market.
In this way, the institution will have bet on collecting dollars from the market by collecting bills, instead of relying on the Central Bank and its monetary policy to buy dollars, after collecting in Lebanese pounds.
It is noteworthy that a number of citizens tried yesterday to storm the headquarters of the Ministry of Energy in protest against the exorbitant bills
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