European Consumer Protection Commissioner Meglena Kouneva has said that she will defend the interests of energy and heating utilities customers, even if she has to take the Bulgarian Government to court.

If European law on public utilities is not implemented properly, she will hold the Government responsible and take it before the Commission, Bulgarian news agency BTA reported.

Brussels has already initiated an investigation into relevant Bulgarian legislation. Toplofikatsiya and other energy providers should be forced to issue their customers with accurate, coherent, and straightforward bills. They will be required to issue them regularly and on time, mediapool.bg reported.

According to BTA, the past month has seen a dramatic rise in cases where hot water has been cut off from apartment blocks because some customers had not paid their bills to Bulgargaz or Toplofikatsiya. The concern is that it is technically impossible to punish a customer who has not paid without inflicting the same punishment on those who have.

Brussels is stepping in and the rules are simple. If article 12 of directive 32 from 2006 is not implemented by Bulgaria, the country will be sanctioned. In brief, the article says that customers are guaranteed that they will be invoiced on individual consumption, and that consumption will be measured accurately. This will provide customers at all times with accurate information on what they have used, how much they owe and when they have to pay the bill. It will also help customers plan for the winter.

At a news conference at the end of the forum, Kouneva said that 25 per cent of clients of Toplofikatsiya had complained regularly that their bills arrived only once in three months – a highly unorthodox practice, something that needs to be rectified forthwith. Kouneva said that in other European countries, like Sweden, bills arrived every six months, but customers could demand at any time to be told exactly what their outstanding balances were and how much they had paid by that point. Television channel bTV reported Kouneva as saying: “It is abnormal, not to say illegal, for a customer to be totally ignorant about how much energy he has consumed, and exactly what he is paying for...”

The Energy Committee has organised a European Citizen’s Energy Forum, where a range of issues will be discussed and analysed, from energy consumption and services to changing suppliers. At the end of October, the European energy consumers’ organisation will release comparable data for all the countries in the European Union. “We don’t want much,” Kouneva was reported by BTA as saying, “We just want to know what we are paying for.”

In Bulgaria, energy companies have agreed to deal with customer inquiries within 24 hours. Parliament’s committee on the economy has promised that this will be implemented, and Kouneva has declared that she will hold them to their promise.

She has encouraged Bulgarian consumers to complain and not remain passive. In the European Union, 58 per cent of energy goes to private consumers and not large-scale businesses, which implies that consumers should have the same rights as businesses to high standards of service. In Bulgaria last year, heating bills cost up to 11 per cent of the average family income, whereas this year the sum is projected to increase to 13 per cent.