The Minister of Energy announced new emergency measures for energy and natural gas invoices that the Government is obliged to adopt, after millions of Romanians from all over the country received invoices drawn up erroneously and found themselves with very large amounts charged by suppliers .
The Minister of Energy talks about these urgent measures that the Government must take so that Romanians receive correct bills for the consumption they had, but also so that they are not disconnected while they are waiting for new measures from the authorities.
"We have partial results from the ANPC control, and out of 72 controlled so far, irregularities were found in 23, the controls are ongoing, and we are talking about big players in the market, who have millions of customers, practically the majority of customers in the market, both for electricity and natural gas, and this obviously means millions of bills.
The question I asked myself this week is that it is very difficult for me to understand how they could take the responsibility to release the invoices in an erroneous way, knowing full well that they do not have the IT applications ready, instead of waiting to complete the IT applications, and then issue the invoices exactly as they should.
Now it will work, because ANPC gave fines of over 400.000 LEI this week, last year it gave a total of several million LEI fines in the energy area, and the complementary sanctions involve the re-instatement of invoices. Next week, in the government meeting, we will amend the capping and compensation law, and we will oblige all suppliers to restore the invoices without penalties.
We will stop any kind of disconnection during the period of this law because we want to put the customer on an equal footing with the supplier, so that there is no means of pressure from the latter to force the customer to pay an erroneous invoice under the threat of disconnection, so it will be and the obligation not to oblige customers to disconnect during this entire period.
I don't see the suppliers taking kindly to this disconnection, but they showed us that they were not in good faith, and when you are not in good faith, I understand that the invoices must be paid, but the correct invoices must be paid, not the invoices made in a wrong way, that's why I want this measure to block the disconnections during the application period of this law. A declared Virgil Popescu."
