President will monitor regulation to guarantee public services

The President Gustavo Petro announced this Thursday that he will assume “directly and personally” control of administration policies and control of public services homes, a decision he made “depending on the users”.

“This president has decided not to delegate his functions to the public services regulation commissions, at least for a while. So, I am going to assume control of the general administration policies of Colombia, directly and personally, depending on what the same law says: first, the general interest and that of the user,” said the president.

Petro said that “the President of the Republic, by constitutional order, has the power to generate the general policies of administration, control and efficiency of residential public services, which are water, electricity.”

He also explained that this decision is based on article 370 of the Constitution, which allows the president to “indicate, subject to the law, the general policies for the administration and efficiency control of residential public services and to exercise, through the Superintendence of Public Services, control, inspection and surveillance of the entities that provide them”.

Meanwhile, the Superintendent of Residential Public Services, Dagoberto Quiroga, assured that “the regulation of residential public services, in light of higher precepts, is just a form of state intervention to correct the errors of an imperfect market.”

The objective of this measure, he added on Twitter, is “to preserve healthy and transparent competition, in order to achieve a better service.”