Meralco Fleeces Consumers with ‘Tong-pats’

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PUBLISHED ON May 14, 2008 AT 1:31 PM

In his column today, Neal Cruz provides an interesting rundown of the items in the electric bill that consumers receive from Meralco, the power distribution company owned by the Lopezes. Most households routinely ignore these items, but Cruz enumerated and explained these in such a way that, after reading his column, you probably wouldn’t look at Meralco and the Lopezes the same way again.

Cruz concludes: “Business is full of risks. You either make a profit or you lose your shirt. But as a capitalist and as a business, Meralco doesn’t risk anything and doesn’t lose anything. It passes on all the losses and operating costs to its customers and pockets all the profits, plenty of it. Can you think of a better arrangement than that?”

The gall, therefore, of Meralco to put out several full-page advertisements in newspapers the past week claiming that Napocor/Transco and the government have been getting kickbacks, or “tong-pats,” which Meralco says explains why the electricity Transco sells to distributors is expensive. I have no doubt that some hanky-panky has been going on at Transco and that the government’s campaign against Meralco is ill-motivated but it would do Meralco good to explain the allegations in Cruz’s column. Otherwise, it will have a hell of a time getting sympathy and support from the public that it allegedly fleeces.

(CC Hidalgo/pinoypress.net)

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