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Thursday, March 28, 2024

PECO asked to substantiate explanation on the purchase of luxury car

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Power customers asked Panay Electric Co., the former electricity distributor in Iloilo City, to substantiate its explanation on the acquisition of a luxury car.

Halley Alcarde, general manager of Western Visayas Transport Cooperative and an accountant by profession, said “all administrative expenses are charged to consumers 100 percent but a luxurious car can never be an administrative expense”.

“It should be a capital expense,” Alcarde said, adding that PECO’s admission, through its lawyers, had added more questions to the issue.

PECO’s legal counsel denied the allegations regarding the acquisition of a BMW vehicle, which was later sold to the company’s president and chief executive officer.

PECO, through its legal counsel, said in published reports the company did not purchase a luxury BMW using consumers’ money.

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“In 2015, PECO purchased a secondhand BMW after it was used by the government for the APEC Summit. The records will clearly show that said purchase was an administrative expense that was charged to PECO’s own account,” PECO lawyers said.

They said the BMW acquisition “never became part of any of the amounts billed to consumers, as is PECO’s practice with its administrative expenditures” and was never included in PECO’s Energy Regulatory Commission-approved capital expenditure.

Alcarde said treating the acquisition of the luxury car as administrative expense might be true but remained questionable because PECO’s 2015 financial statement showed that the company only purchased P747,000 worth of transportation equipment and it could not have included the BMW estimated at P5 million.

Alcarde earlier said PECO should justify to the people the BMW issue “so it must be investigated by the authorities.”

“They have to prove that they have not wasted consumers’ money here or else they have to answer for it,” he said.

Another transport leader, ICLAJODA president Raymundo  Parcon, earlier said the ERC should also look into the matter.

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