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Colombia to liquidate energy firm Air-e amid service failures
🇨🇴 Colombia /Energy & Infrastructure

Colombia to liquidate energy firm Air-e amid service failures

From El Tiempo · () Spanish

Translated from Spanish, summarized and contextualized by DistantNews.

At a glance

News Named sources New plan
  • The Colombian government plans to liquidate the energy company Air-e due to its poor service and accumulated debt.
  • President Gustavo Petro announced the decision, aiming to create a new public energy company for the Caribbean region.
  • The move follows a nearly two-year government intervention that failed to resolve Air-e's financial and operational issues.

The Colombian government is set to liquidate the private energy company Air-e, which provides service to La Guajira, Magdalena, and Atlántico departments, due to its persistent deficiencies and significant debt. President Gustavo Petro announced the decision, signaling a major shift in the national energy market.

This drastic restructuring, planned to occur after the upcoming presidential runoff election, aims to establish a new public entity by merging Air-e's assets with the public generator Gecelca. This initiative seeks to create a state-owned energy corporation for the Caribbean coast, addressing years of operational failures and financial deterioration that the state intervention, initiated in September 2024, could not rectify.

Air-e's service has been widely criticized for directly impacting millions of residential, commercial, and industrial users. The company's financial collapse intensified during the 21-month intervention, exacerbated by the political rejection in Congress of reforms proposed by the executive to socialize and index non-technical losses within the tariff system. The government also plans to extend its "Colombia Solar" program, which has an approved budget of 8 trillion pesos, to transform homes in the region into sources of clean energy and reduce business losses due to non-payment.

My decision is to liquidate Air-e to achieve that its assets configure a common company with another Caribbean public company

— Gustavo PetroPresident Petro announced the government's decision to liquidate Air-e and merge its assets with another public company.
DistantNews Editorial

Originally published by El Tiempo in Spanish. Translated, summarized, and contextualized by our editorial team with added local perspective. Read our editorial standards.

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