BY VÍCTOR MAYÉN
The News
MEXICO CITY – The National Action Party (PAN) bench in the Senate announced a series of conditions for the energy reform on Thursday which they said were not open to negotiation.
PAN Senator Jorge Luis Lavalle Maury, a member of the Senate Energy Committee, said that if the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) wants his party’s votes on the energy reform, it must include transparency on oil profits, a sovereign wealth fund for oil, strong regulatory agencies and the end of the influence of the National Oil Workers Union (STPRM) — currently led by PRI Senator Carlos Romero Deschamps — on the operations of state-run oil monopoly Pemex.
“We need the energy reform to make both Pemex and the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) strong companies, with corporate governance structures, so that they can be competitive,” Lavalle Maury said. He added that the energy reform also needs to have a nationalist component designed to create a domestic energy industry, so that not all of the public-private contracts that the proposed reform would allow Pemex and the CFE to make would be made with foreign corporations.
Discussion on the energy reform is expected to begin on Sunday, though it will not be brought to a floor vote until Tuesday, and not Monday as was previously announced. This schedule change was due to a procedural error that was brought to the attention of Energy Committee President David Penchyna Grub by Dolores Padierna Luna, deputy coordinator of the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) bench.
“We can’t allow our own rules to be violated, which establishes that at least 24 hours of anticipation are needed to convoke all the members of the respective committees that will be involved in drafting a bill,” Padierna Luna said.
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