It all started with some electricity bills with values that were anomalous, higher than what they usually received. Several customers also found that the value of the receipt did not match the consumption recorded on the meter. Only a few started with the complaint, but later they multiplied by thousands. It seemed more like the invoice number had been calculated with a different methodology, that of the historical average. In any case, it was a way of doing it, different from that stipulated in the standard. The origin of the invoices was the Italian company Enel, which distributes energy to 3.5 million customers in Colombia.
Users outraged by the value of the account decided to knock on doors at the Superintendency of Home Public Services, Superservicios, now headed by Dagoberto Quiroga. The Superintendent is a trusted lawyer of Petro, also a former legal representative of human Colombia, and who has been in the direction of Superservicios since September 2022. However, the case of the claim for the electricity bills was Natasha Avendaño, the superintendent during the government of Iván Duque, who some time later ended up as Commissioner in the Creg; However, her appointment was repealed by the Council of State.
With the claims in hand, the Superintendency decided to open an investigation against Enel. The questions to be resolved were: If there were strange charges for how long was the historical average method used to calculate the invoice? And how many people were affected by irregular collections? The answers to the investigation were that, during the months of March, April and May 2020, the number of affected people reached 260,708 users, who received from Enel an invoice made using average consumption, and not in the conventional way from of the home meter, something that constitutes a violation of public service regulations.
Natasha Avendaño, the superintendent during the government of Iván Duque, and current manager of the Bogotá Aqueduct, has expertise in the issue of electricity rates. As a result of having been in charge of the liquidation of Electricaribe, in October 2020, Avendaño, in addition to ending Electricaribe, had to hand over the supply of electricity service to the newly formed companies E-aire, owned by Rios Velilla, and Afinia, managed by EPM, although a definitive solution for the Caribbean Coast has not yet appeared. Natasha was also in charge of initiating the investigation against Enel.
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According to the opinion of Superservicios, the behavior of Enel, at that time chaired by Lucio Rubio Díaz, in the first months of 2020 was recurring and regardless of whether the failure was accidental or intentional, the bill could not be calculated using the historical average. Despite all of Natasha’s work, Dagoberto Quiroga was in charge of imposing, in August 2023, the sanction on the Italian multinational, for a value that amounted to $237 million pesos for irregular collections in electricity bills. Enel, a company based in Colombia since 1997, linked to the generation, marketing and distribution of energy and now seeking to engage in the alternative energy business. She is a pioneer in the world, a reason that led her to inaugurate a large solar park in La Loma, in the department of Cesar. The president, Francesco Bertoli, who was appointed a few months ago, was present during the delivery.
The case of Enel is not the exception in claims regarding public service rates. During the pandemic, other companies such as Emgesa, Empresa de Energía de Arauca, Centrales Eléctricas de Nariño, Compañía Energética de Occidente, Empresa Distribuidora del Pacífico, Celsia Tolima, Celsia Colombia, Compañía de Electricidad de Tuluá, Latin American Capital Corp, Transportadora Eléctrica del Caribe and Transelca were fined by Superservicios, according to the bulletin for the third quarter of 2022. The vast majority of the sanctions were for irregular collection of services, a critical situation if one takes into account that the country and the world suffered the ravages of the pandemic.
