Citi Business News has gathered that the Electricity Company of Ghana (ECG) has settled debts to all Independent Power Producers (IPPs) for the months of June and July after earlier concerns expressed by the power generation companies.
Sources close to Citi Business News confirm that all the IPPs have received a second payment for current bills from June directly from the ECG.
The external communications manager for the ECG, Leila Abubakari disclosed that the necessary measures have been put in place to ensure the arrears owed the IPPs are eventually cleared.
“We have promised them that the current bills that they raising for us, will be paid because we have found a way of increasing our revenue through our digitalization process and we are now able to collect more than we were able to collect and so the bills that are raised for us on a monthly basis, we are going to honour those ones while we have discussions about how to clear the debt that accrued for the past few years now.
“That is the stage that we are in right now but that is a high-level conversation between ECG, the Ministry of Energy, the Ministry of Finance, and then the IPPs but so far, all is calm, and we are still very much in development partnership, and they are doing their bit and then we are also paying them on all the bills that they are raising for us.”
The Chamber of Independent Power Producers had previously issued warnings of potential nationwide power cuts in response to the overdue payments.
However, these threats were put on hold following productive discussions between the Chamber and the ECG.
The IPPs were pushing for a 30 percent interim payment of the debts, which had ballooned to over $2 billion.
However, the information available to Citi Business News suggests that invoices for the debts have been received by the IPPs with the ECG promising to be current with the payment going forward.
