The Legislative-Administrative Council unanimously qualified the emergency bill on energy competitiveness and referred it to the Committee for Economic Development for analysis and preparation of a report for the first hearing.

The session was held in hybrid mode, with President Henry Kronfle (PSC) and First Vice President, Viviana Veloz (RC), meeting in person and the others being present virtually. For the qualification, the report of the Legislative-Technical Unit was taken as a reference, which, after analyzing the proposal, determined that the project meets the formal requirements, therefore recommends its qualification and suggests that the proposal be sent for analysis to the Commission’s Economic Development Administration. This legislative table is chaired by government representative Valentina Centeno.

Daniel Noboa’s new emergency law wants to open the electricity sector to private companies in exceptional cases

The project proposes delegating to private companies the performance of public electricity service activities in exceptional cases, at a time when Ecuador is going through a period of power outages.

During the CAL session, two Correismo delegates: Viviana Veloz and Esther Cuesta, expressed their objections to the proposal of the President of the Republic, Daniel Noboa, who gave the same speech.

Before registering their vote to qualify the proposal, both Veloz and Cuesta demanded greater rigor from the executive branch in preparing the text. Veloz explained that the project aims to reform the organic law on public electric power service, and pointed out that in economic terms it will leave a marginal income for a country that has a fiscal deficit of more than five million dollars.

He explained that this project will not solve the serious disaster that Ecuador is going through in public finances, it does not think about a medium and long-term solution; Therefore, he assured that these are short-term patch solutions.

He said that the proposal aims to encourage citizens to believe that this bill will solve the energy crisis, and that the solution is a matter of investment and management, and the Minister of Energy and Mining herself pointed out to the Supervisory Committee that this crisis will be solved within two to three years.

“We hope that the President of the Republic, Daniel Noboa, understands that there is an institutional problem because there is no specialty on that subject within the Ministry of Energy and Mining,” Veloz emphasized.

Cuesta noted that in the executive’s proposal there is confusion in the articles, for example, he said that there are transitional provisions that should come before the final provisions, which is why he suggested that the executive have more rigor in the surprising texts; He also said that there is a reform in the draft text of the law on economic efficiency and employment, which was published two days ago in the Official Register.

The National Assembly has a deadline of 30 days to process this second urgent economic project submitted by the President in two debates.