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Pretoria - Eskom fears town residents could rise up against their municipalities if they find out how much the municipalities owe the electricity utility.
This is one of the reasons advanced by Eskom for its refusal to provide the National Taxpayers Union (NTU) with information on outstanding municipal debtors.
On Saturday Eskom informed NTU spokesperson Jaap Kelder that it had turned down the organisation's request in terms of the Promotion of Access to Information Act.
The NTU is worried that certain municipalities are not paying their Eskom accounts and that their towns' electricity could be disconnected, prejudicing residents who religiously pay their municipal electricity accounts.
The electricity giant cites two sections of the act.
The first stipulates that a request for information should be refused if it would mean violating an agreement to treat information about a third party confidentially.
Michael Reynolds, deputy information officer at Eskom, says the clause protects municipalities from providing confidential and commercial electricity-supply information to third parties.
As regards the other clause, Eskom says that publication of the state of their indebtedness could lead to uprisings against municipalities and therefore, even though there are grounds for the public to know the state of municipal arrears, it is more in the public interest to avoid provoking trouble by the release of information.
In an e-mail circular Kelder says that an Eskom official informed him that the R256m which, according to a leaked document, was owed by municipalities to the power utility at the end of December last year, has swelled in the past couple of months and the situation is worsening month by month.
He said that the NTU had further action in mind, but this would initially involve only those towns that are withholding municipal taxes and service fees under the direction of the NTU, in protest against poor service delivery.
* Someone who said that he was from Eskom's forensic division phoned Sake24 on Friday, attempting to find out who at Eskom had leaked the document previously reported on by Sake 24. He said this formed part of a larger investigation into information that was being continually leaked. Sake24 protected its sources.
- Sake24.com
For more business news in Afrikaans, go to Sake24.com.