UPDATE 2-Mexico’s president invites major organization to debate electrical power legal guidelines

(Provides history on independent ability producer contracts)

MEXICO Metropolis, March 26 (Reuters) – Mexico’s president on Friday invited the heads of some of the country’s most popular organizations to defend power procedures of his predecessors, which he states give the personal sector preferential therapy.

“Massive small business firms and retail chains spend reduce fees than people for household intake… and we imagine all those subsidies paid out with the people’s income really should vanish,” President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador instructed a typical news conference.

The president and executives of state-owned ability corporation, the Comision Federal de Electricidad (CFE), have criticized vitality legislation enacted by preceding administrations, as nicely as the companies benefiting from those people procedures. Lopez Obrador characterised the reduced selling prices paid by providers as a state-sponsored subsidy and known as them an “injustice.”

But, Lopez Obrador added, it was only honest that the beneficiaries of former President Enrique Pena Nieto’s procedures have the proper to reply.

He invited the bosses of Walmart’s Mexico unit (Walmex) , conglomerate Femsa, breadmaker Grupo Bimbo, and Spain’s Iberdrola to debate the current guidelines at the presidential palace in Mexico City, without specifying a time.

The so-termed independent ability producer contracts were signed by firms including Bimbo and Walmart and predate the Peña Nieto administration. They were being designed to give bargains on very long-expression power offer if organizations invested in renewable energy generation.

Lopez Obrador also invited associates of community newspapers Reforma and El Universal, as properly as Spain’s El Pais to occur to the discussion, arguing the media has taken the side of the personal sector towards his electrical power guidelines.

Last week, a Mexican court requested a definitive suspension of Lopez Obrador’s contentious new electricity legislation, which seeks to strengthen CFE. The president known as for the Supreme Court to settle the subject.

Lopez Obrador observed that Bimbo and Walmex equally filed authorized troubles towards the law. He explained the appeals as an exertion to maintain favorable conditions from prior regulation.

Walmex declined to remark. Femsa and Bimbo did not right away reply to requests for comment. (Reporting by Anthony Esposito and David Alire Garcia producing by Cassandra Garrison Editing by Aurora Ellis, Rosalba O’Brien and David Gregorio)