P.U.C. fights B.T.L. on rate hikes
By any account, it’s about as close to a rock and a hard place as you can get. Tonight the Public Utilities Commission is charged with finding common ground between the monopoly telecommunications provider: Belize Telecommunications Limited and the Belizean consumer. B.T.L. is insisting that as part of its ongoing preparation for the onset of competition it must revise its rates to, “help reduce B.T.L.’s exposure to unfair cherry-picking of international voice services by competitors and continue to reduce the level of cross-subsidies required for local calls.” But the Belizean consumer is anything but sympathetic to B.T.L.’s claims of financial woes and this latest announcement has the public crying foul, particularly when it reads the printed ads in which B.T.L. is seeking to implement its higher local rates on September twelfth. Confused? Well according to the Chairman of the Public Utilities Commission, customers needn’t be.
Dr. Gilbert Canton, Chairman, Public Utilities Commission
“We have made it very clear to B.T.L. that those rates will not go in on September twelfth as far as we are concerned. That will be contradictory and a contravention of their license and the law and we would have to take the necessary steps if they try to go ahead and implement those rates. So that’s kind of where we are with that position.”
Janelle Chanona
“What has the company’s stand been, in the newspaper they saying they are doing this in response to cherry-picking in the market. Does B.T.L. have a case from this end?”
Dr. Gilbert Canton
“Basically, the grounds of that is that they were saying that the international rates have always cross-subsidised the local rates…and if you are going to introduce competition you need to rebalance the rates to make sure that the services are more or less brought to some sort of, at least cost based, that they are covering their cost in the different, respective services. It is something that is done in other jurisdictions. What we don’t have is that, we at the P.U.C. are not convinced that these are necessarily the figures that achieved that end and we have been working with B.T.L. to try to secure numbers and stuff to do our own analysis to see what is exactly the rate position for B.T.L.”
Janelle Chanona
“Will the P.U.C. have teeth as far as going up against B.T.L. if they go ahead with this rate scheme that they are proposing on September twelfth?”
Dr. Gilbert Canton
“Clearly, if they go ahead trying to implement these rates on September twelfth, it would be contravention of their license and contravention of the law.”
“In that regard, there are recourses under the law that we can take. The one that comes to mind is the one that refers specifically to a summary condition in the Magistrate’s Court; the penalty would be like a five hundred thousand dollar immediate fine plus a ten thousand fine per day fine for the continuing offence. So, there are remedies. I think this is going to be, is they go ahead, it’ll be the first time the P.U.C. is going to be tested to see how far we can implement these remedies that are there under the law.”
And speaking of the legality of rates, even as B.T.L. pitches tariff re-balancing to consumers, there is still the question of whether the current prices they are charging customers are valid. According to Chairman Gilbert Canton, the bottom line is that the recent court ruling addressed the validity of the stop order issued in December 2001, not what the rates should be. Canton says the P.U.C. will now have to take that issue back to the judiciary.
Dr. Gilbert Canton
“Hopefully, it won’t be lengthy, because basically what we are asking, as far as I understand it, I’m not a legal person I am guided by legal counsel on this, but the way I understand it is really just for an interpretation in the courts as to exactly what was meant in the different rulings and judgments that were passed along the line. So it does not appear to be a lengthy procedure, but I can’t really speak to that. We were hoping that by the end of this month we will have the application in, made out and put into the courts.”
