Shoreline negotiating out of court settlement [1]
Friday, May 19, 2006 - 17:30. Updated on Sunday, March 16, 2014 - 12:11.
The People's Democratic Party PDP, Shoreline Power and the Tonga Electric Power Board are currently negotiating for a settlement out off court, said the president of the PDP Sione Teisina Fuko yesterday, May 18.
On March 24, 2005 the People's Democratic Party served a writ claiming that the Tonga Electric Power Board did not have the right to lease the government power generation facility to Shoreline Power, and that an 11 seniti rise in the price of electricity in early 2005 was illegal, therefore it was demanding for Shoreline Power to return the power generation facility to government.
Of the three claims made by the PDP, Shoreline on May 25, 2005 responded by offering to return the power generation facility to government in return for a settlement on their investment on the power generation facility.
Teisina said that the $60 million that Government sought to borrow from China to buy back the power supply from Shoreline, "is just a crazy figure". He believed that the appropriate figure was no where near $60 million.
Teisina said that the PDP had already won their case against Shoreline. ...We know that if we did not pursue the court case against Shoreline they would not have budged or even think of returning the power to the Government."
Teisina said the reason why they agreed to negotiate for a settlement out of court was because Government feared that if the PDP insisted on a court hearing, "Shoreline might feel threatened and pull out all its power investments such as power generators and transformers and sell it to some company overseas and because Government clearly has no money at present to buy back the power, the people might be left with no power for a long period of time.
...We believe this is the most reasonable and right thing to do for the people of Tonga, and we are definitely not betraying the people by backing out, we feel this is the right thing at this point and because it is a legal matter we are limited only to the point of law..., he said.