Power funds grant sanctioned

Press, 23 November 1983, Page 9

Power funds grant sanctioned

The annual $300,009 Christchurch City Council grant to the Queen Elizabeth II Park sports complex was well inside the limits of the Government’s transfer agreement with electricity supply authorities, said the Electricity Division of the Ministry of Energy yesterday. The Government has tied its South Island 10 per cent electricity price concession, announced on Monday, to “immediate” moves by supply authorities to bring electricity surplus transfers inside limits set by agreement between the Electrical Supply Authorities’ Association and the Government several years ago. The agreement says that profits up to 1.5 per cent of electricity revenue may be transferred to “non-energy-related” projects but that additional profits may only be transferred to “energyrelated” accounts.

A report in “The Press” yesterday said that the 1.5 per cent transfer must be only to energy-related accounts.

A spokesman for the Electricity Division said yesterday that the Christchurch M.E.D. was a big enterprise and that the $300,000 grant would be well within the 1.5 per cent non-energy transfer guidelines. The warning to bring transfers to non-energy accounts down to the 1.5 per cent limit was directed at those electricity supply authorities which were transferring profits to accounts and projects that could only dubiously be considered to be energy-re-lated, the spokesman said.