FOR THE past three years, the state-owned monopoly Napocor has been fooling the public, and nobody in Congress has made even just a pipsqueak about it, much less lifted a dirty finger against it.

Why was that? Only heaven knew.

But if you ask the guys down here in our barangay, you will probably hear a lot of expletives instead of answers.

And up to now, nobody in Congress takes Napocor to task for the high power rates in this country, which are the second highest in Asia.

Yet the electricity watchdog Energy Regulatory Commission, or ERC, itself already documented the robbery foisted by Napocor upon all overtaxed electricity users in this country.

ERC chair Rodolfo Albano has been saying that Napocor should have cut its electricity rates as a result of the past three years of gains by the peso against the dollar.

And, may I add, that Napocor should have done it a long time ago.

Just remember that Napocor still controls roughly 75 percent of all the electricity generated here. It simply sells the electricity to distributors like Meralco and the provincial cooperatives. These mothers then pass on everything to the public.

Thus, whatever cheating Napocor does, should inescapably land in our monthly electricity bills--now going at P11 a kWh and still counting.

In previous columns, we have been wondering about the "profits" of our beloved Napocor over the past three years, which paralleled the peso's gain against the dollar.

The peso's strength, to us, meant that Napocor would need a lot less money in terms of pesos (which it got from all of us as payment for the electricity), so that it could pay for the same amount of dollar obligations, such as foreign loans, imported fuel and imported equipment.

As it turned out, at least according to the watchdog ERC, precisely because of the so-called foreign exchange gains, the state-owned monopoly should owe us, the public, at least P155 billion for 2005 and 2006 alone.

In other words, the ERC still has to estimate the forex gains that Napocor should have passed on to us last year.

Okay, according to our lawmakers, as if on cue from the Lola at the Palace, who publicly blamed Meralco--and Meralco alone--for our high electricity rate, it was just Meralco cheating us.

Sure, boss, and Napocor should get a congressional medal of honor or something. Is that it?

* * *

THAT the ERC actually chastised Napocor for the forex gains it booked as "profits," instead of passing on to us through reduction in electricity rates, has been widely known in the business sector.

That was probably the reason why you could hear some snickering in business circles, regarding the recent publicity antics of the Lola at the Palace.

Before business groups recently, the chief executive of the land expressed helplessness in reducing the power rates, simply because she was up against a giant like Meralco. Wah!

And so she even asked the business sector to join her in suing Meralco before the ERC. Double wah!

Alright, assuming that as the Lola claimed, this administration has no influence over an independent government body like ERC, and much less over a private company like Meralco, even it is in a government-regulated business, how come she allowed Napocor to keep those hundreds of billions of pesos in forex gains to itself all along?

I mean, boss, we really needed the relief a long time ago.

Why did she not just order Napocor years ago to the cut its power rates based on the foreign exchange gains?

Come on, unlike ERC and Meralco, Napocor was and still is under her control, the Napocor mafia notwithstanding.

* * *

FROM its official figures, Napocor claimed to have generated and sold some 34,000 gigawatt-hour of electricity in 2005.

According to our sources that could do the math, the foreign exchange gains of Napocor in 2005 should have resulted in a rate reduction of more than P2 per kWh.

Bigger cuts thus should have resulted in 2006, when the peso's even showed more strength against the dollar.

To explain its forgetfulness about the forex gains, Napocor now says that there was indeed a delay "of more than a year" in its application with the ERC for rate reduction due to forex gains. I see.

Again, that was more than a year, and it was just a, er, "delay?" What--some clerks in Napocor forgot to check the exchange rate of the peso for more than year? Or something like that.

* * *

WHAT is this we hear that the night before the Lola initiated the attack against Meralco, there was a meeting at the Palace that lasted almost until dawn.

In the meeting were, aside from the Lola, the likes of ERC chair Albano, Trade and Industry Secretary Peter Favila and Energy Secretary Angelo Reyes.

And so it seems that the Lola's boys knew beforehand that Meralco would be labeled as the only problem. The Lopez company would be accused in the Lola's speech the following day before some business groups, as the sole cause of the public's misery over the high electricity rates.

But why didn't the Lola at the Palace ask Meralco to attend the meeting?

I mean, really, other presidents of ours would have begged, cajoled or threatened--and secretly, too--to get what they wanted from a bad business boy such as Meralco, if only for the public good.

Somebody perhaps melted the poor Lola's mind. It seems one of her "advisers" only wanted her to hear half-truths about the electricity rates.

But she was not the only victim here. We all were.