By Chryssa Liaggou
The Public Power Corporation (PPC) yesterday issued a carefully worded statement refuting Kathimerini’s article revealing a company plan for a partnership with Electricite de France (EDF).
“There are no discussions currently under way, nor an agreed plan between PPC and French electricity company EDF on joint investment projects in the domestic and European markets,” PPC said in a statement.
According to sources, Kathimerini’s article led GENOP, the powerful union of PPC employees to confront the company’s management with demands for explanations.
Kathimerini is in a position to know that the first contacts toward an eventual partnership were made last August. There is nothing secret in that. On August 22, 2004, Development Minister Dimitris Sioufas had met with EDF President Francois Roussely. It was announced then that “issues of cooperation between PPC and EDF and other matters of common interest, especially matters of cooperation in the energy sector, were discussed.”
What was not revealed was that immediately after the meeting, Sioufas sent a letter to PPC Chairman Yiannis Palaiokrassas and Managing Director Stergios Nezis, urging them to go to France as soon as possible in order to open talks with EDF on joint ventures.
On September 16, Palaiokrassas proposed to the PPC board to build new electricity-producing units, with a total capacity of 1,600 megawatts, in partnership with Greek and foreign firms.
(Talks between PPC and EDF were stalled because Roussely was replaced last September by Pierre Gadonneix. Nezis resigned earlier this year in protest after Palaiokrassas went to a prosecutor behind his back to denounce some of Nezis’s decisions as illegal.)
The Regulatory Authority of Energy favors the partnership, seeing it as a big boost to market deregulation.
(Kathimerini)