Next winter will be a terrible one and we will see huge energy prices, factories closing and people staying in the dark and cold, because they will not be able to pay their bills, if the Government does not take urgent measures, said Marian Năstase, the president The Board of Directors of Alro Slatina, in an interview for Agerpres.

At the moment there is chaos on the energy market and the worst will only come from now on, he believes. The invoice compensation scheme is in fact “a colossal fraud of the public money”, because the money goes to the accounts of intermediaries between producers and consumers. The “smart guys” in energy still exist and earn billions of public money, says Năstase, so a short-term market regulation mechanism is necessary.

Alro Slatina, the largest energy consumer in the country, which closed 60% of its electrolysis, has abandoned its plans to return to full capacity for next year and is preparing to send 500 of its 2,500 employees into technical unemployment, until the end of the year.

Năstase expects several factories and industrial capacities in Romania to close this winter, with social and economic effects. There will be people who will lose their jobs and sit in the dark and cold, because they won’t have anything to pay their bills, he says.

In his opinion, energy producers should be obliged to sell part of the production directly to industrial consumers, on the special platform that exists on the stock exchange, thus eliminating intermediaries.

“This compensation of the population’s bills was not a very inspired measure. First of all, and this is what we signaled, the industry signaled, and not only the industry, there were several voices that said: be careful when you make such a compensation structure, that it will not lead to the calming of prices. In the sense that, as long as the energy suppliers know that they will receive the money from the state, representing the difference between the compensated price and the price at which they purchase, they have no interest in purchasing cheaper. On the contrary.

“There are anomalies in the market, when they prefer to buy at one price, after that they resell among friends, so to speak, and artificially increase the price in order to take as much money as possible from the state. And I think that this is what ANRE (Regulatory Authority in the field of Energy n.r.) is referring to, which launched some investigations on the energy market. Finally ANRE woke up and it’s good that it woke up. We don’t know if it woke up entirely. But at least the fact that it launched these investigations shows that they are also aware that some fraud can happen. That in fact these matters lead to the fraud of public money, they lead to the fraud of citizens’ taxes. We collect from the many and the poor and put in the pockets of the few and the rich. This is the concept,” added the chairman of the Board of Directors of Alro.