These companies know they are privileged and politically dependent, so they try to keep up a good relationship with whoever is in power. So the energy market is the perfect soil for growing the most diverse types of corruption.

 

The case of La Caixa-Gas Natural’s bid to takeover Endesa is the main course in this on-going political banquet in which the free market and the consumers are slowly gobbled up: unpaid loans; discarded reports; a Minister showing preference for the tactical maneuvers of groups from his home region and their loans; a President of the European Corruption (I mean, Commission) secretly flying in a military plane to discuss the operation with a Prime Minister; rulings that are thrown away and substituted by conclusions stating the exact opposite; calls to the takeover bidders to inform them of things their prey doesn’t know; or a Prime Minister having dinner with his pals who happen to authorize sucking energy away from the consumers. These are just some examples of how far the political effort to control electricity can go in our society.

 

But this horrible takeover bid is only an example of what unavoidably ends up happening when we accept political power treating individuals as nobodies, conferring on itself all kinds of powers –from licensing to fixing prices or pouring absurd public funding into the types of energy production they like. There have been “megawattical” cases abroad. In the United States, ENRON became the brain behind the Clinton-Gore tandem in every thing related to energy and the environment causing scandals almost as spoken about and far-fetched as those regarding the sexophonist Democratic President. Among them I can mention the August 1997 Oval Office meeting between ENRON representatives and Al and Bill in order to study how address carbon dioxide or how to get the country to join the Kyoto game, thus benefiting ENRON’s position and its political patron in turn. Fortunately, this energy-political scheme was filtered to public opinion and never came to fruition because the American Senate unanimously rejected the protocol.

 

Back in Spain, our politicians’ current favorite energetic drink is still plotting with the energy-business elite they created. The latest example comes from the Canary Islands, where civil servants, politicians, business men, port authorities and God knows what other groups seem to have been fiddling with licenses for new wind power areas. It is not unusual for this to happen, and even less so in the Canary Islands, because the highly regulated energy industry receives huge public funding as an investment and is a sure sale thanks to the distributors being forced to buy and the prices being artificially inflated by political power. All we need is for Mr. Montilla to come out and say such practices are good for the consumer and help liberalize the energy market. In the meantime, the rest of us are sucking our thumbs in the dark.