Sonelgaz officials are accused of inflating electricity bills

Investigative judge of Algiers Sidi M’Hamed court ended the investigation procedures of listening to the parties that are involved in the corruption file which reached the electricity and gas distribution company of the center, after suspecting more than 26 officials of the company, who were followed with offenses of concluding illegal deals, misuse of companies’ funds, embezzlement and wasting the public funds, abuse of office, as abuses reached the inflation of electricity bills that are oriented for the benefit of public and private institutions and by billions.

Informed sources indicate that the investigating judge referred the file, according to the complaint that was filed on December 21, 2010, by an employee at Sonelgaz, in the distribution directorate of Gue de Constantine in Algiers, that there are several irregularities in violation of the law, that is adopted by the distribution company in order to reduce the proportion of loss through repairing the electrical counters for customers as a first step, in order to determine the percentage of the effective monitoring and reducing the rate of positive methods, as some managers at the General Directorate of the company Sonelgaz are implicated in inflating electricity bills.

The extension of the investigation shows the existence of several law violations, by reducing the proportion of losses and renovation of customers’ electric counters, and it turned out in the midst of interrogations that violations occurred in the period from 2009 to 2010, while the senior instructions that were given to agents in charge of amplifying the bills, and reducing the rate of losses which identified September 2008 by 2%, and in August of the same year by 32%, as it worked with the inflation of the bills in the Directorates of El Harrach, Belouizdad, Gue de Constantine, Bouloughine and Tipaza.