SEC stops payment of transport firms due to fuel theft possibility

A number of contractors transporting fuel for Saudi Electricity Company (SEC) threatened to stop work. This comes in response to SEC’s freezing their payments for more than six months, after it discovered a 10 million liters shortage in the volumes of fuel deliveries to power generation plants.
Sources said that the missing volumes are from deliveries transported to across the Kingdom from May 2011 until last month.
Sources also said that a joint committee, made up of representatives from SEC and a number of major contractors, investigated the matter of missing volumes delivered from Saudi Aramco to different power generation plants.
“We do not like to stop work. But if we go on working without receiving our dues we will incur huge losses and we may eventually go out of business,” said a transport contractor Bandar Al-Jabiri.
He added: “We called for an investigation to know whether or not the matter has criminal implications, like the possibility of some drivers stealing volumes during transportation. But it turned out that there was no criminality in the matter.”
However, SEC’s failure to respond favorably to contractors’ requests, he said the freezing of payments will cause contractors to incur huge losses. SEC insists on retroactively deducting the values of the missing volumes, at international prices.
Abdul-Salam Yamani, vice-chairman for Public Affairs at SEC declined to comment. Fouad Sherbini, vice-chairman of SEC, said he is not authorized to give statements to media.