Southeast Power Firm Fires Back At Mayors Over Unpaid Bills

A lingering crisis over unpaid electricity bills between Dicle Electricity Distribution A.Ş. (DEDAŞ), the company responsible for electricity distribution in the Southeast, and local authorities, showed no signs of resolution as the firm accused the mayors of the areas of ignoring their calls to pay the outstanding bills.

Speaking to reporters in İstanbul on Friday, DEDAŞ spokesman Mehmet Gökay Üstün said southeastern municipalities failed to pay electricity bill debts which totaled TL 206 million to the company. Üstün said TL 90 million of the debt was incurred by the city of Diyarbakır, and that only the Batman Municipality had agreed to pay its debts to DEDAŞ so far. Üstün defended power cuts in the region, saying the company has failed to collect debts from as many as 75 percent of the subscribers in the Southeast. "The total amount of the loss we sustained due to unpaid electricity bills in 2014 was TL 4.8 billion," Üstün added.

Earlier this week Diyarbakır's Silvan Municipality sealed off DEDAŞ's buildings in response to power cuts. DEDAŞ had halted electrical service due to unpaid bills in the southeastern provinces of Diyarbakır, Mardin and Şanlıurfa. The tension later hit the Diyarbakır Municipality's Water and Sewerage Administration (DİSKİ), which was reportedly unable to provide water to the city after DEDAŞ cut its power, too. In response to the power cuts, the Diyarbakır Municipality dug trenches around DEDAŞ's main headquarters in Diyarbakır in order to block all the building's entrances and exits.

Locals said the power cut crisis in Diyarbakır ended on Friday, as DEDAŞ ended a 24-hour electricity cut it had imposed. Due to the power cut more than 500,000 people were left deprived of water for more than 24 hours.

According to several media outlets, DEDAŞ ended power cuts on Friday to the municipalities' water supply stations, in a move to end the two-day period of tension. In 2013, the Turkish Electricity Distribution Company (TEDAŞ) concluded several privatization tenders, selling the Dicle, Vangölü and Toroslar electricity companies for a total of around $3.4 billion.

Illegal use, corruption links

The İşkaya-Doğu Consortium won the privatization tender with an offer of $387 million. Çalık Energy, the Mes A.Ş.-İşkur A.Ş. Consortium and Fernas Construction were the other three bidders in the tender, which opened with a value of $226 million. DEDAŞ supplies electricity to the southeastern provinces of Batman, Diyarbakır, Mardin, Siirt, Şanlıurfa and Şırnak, where 71.4 percent of the population uses electricity illegally.

The methods used by pro-government businessman Abdullah Tivnikli, one of the partners in DEDAŞ, when financing the tender, were a hot topic in Turkish banking circles. Tivnikli had received loans from Kuveyt Türk, where he is deputy board manager, to finance the privatization bid. Tivnikli owns 30 percent of shares in DEDAŞ. Observers have said lending to his own firms will create non-performing loan problems in the long term.

Earlier this month, Tivnikli said he wants to exit his partnership with DEDAŞ in order to avoid further losses due to widespread illegal use of electricity in the area the company operates in.

A suspect in a corruption probe that was made public in December 2013, Tivnikli was allegedly heard asking then-Deputy Undersecretary of the Prime Ministry İbrahim Kalın for reimbursement from the government for subscribers' unpaid electricity bills, in a voice recording leaked on YouTube in April 2014. According to another voice recording announced via Twitter, also in April of last year, Kalın told Tivnikli that the prime minister was in favor of the idea of the state paying the company for illegally consumed electricity, given that the rate of unpaid electricity bills in the Southeast was as high as 60-70 percent.

Tivnikli earlier last year admitted to having spoken to Kalın to get his help regarding the unpaid electricity bills. He also admitted to having paid school fees for Kalın's daughter. Kalın is currently employed as Erdoğan's spokesman.

(Cihan/Today's Zaman)