{"id":51466,"date":"2024-10-10T09:28:20","date_gmt":"2024-10-10T09:28:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/?p=51466"},"modified":"2024-10-10T09:28:20","modified_gmt":"2024-10-10T09:28:20","slug":"just-in-court-strikes-out-mans-suit-challenging-electricity-tariff-hike","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/2024\/10\/10\/just-in-court-strikes-out-mans-suit-challenging-electricity-tariff-hike\/","title":{"rendered":"JUST IN: Court Strikes Out MAN\u2019s Suit Challenging Electricity Tariff Hike"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A Federal High Court in Lagos has dismissed a complaint brought by the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria challenging the execution of the Abuja power Distribution Company and 11 companies&#8217; Band A power rate revision.<\/p>\n<p>According to a statement released on Thursday by the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission, the verdict was handed on Monday.<\/p>\n<p>According to the verdict, the court weighed all of the parties&#8217; arguments and determined that MAN&#8217;s claim constituted an abuse of the judicial process because it was filed prematurely and without consideration for the provisions of Section 51 of the Electricity Act 2023.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The court also determined that MAN&#8217;s case revealed no plausible cause of action since it had not explored the dispute resolution system.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt thus held that the suit was not instituted with due process of law, and consequently struck out the case,\u201d the NERC said.<\/p>\n<p>According to reports, MAN filed a petition in the Lagos Judicial Division of the Federal High Court to contest the NERC&#8217;s small revision of the electricity pricing.<\/p>\n<p>The manufacturers requested four reliefs: that the necessary process required by the Act for the review was not followed before AEDC and the others appealed to NERC for the tariff review on July 31, 2023.<\/p>\n<p>It asserted that regulatory standards for tariff reviews were not met when NERC issued the Supplementary Order on April 3, 2024, and the subsequently reviewed rate on May 6, 2024.<\/p>\n<p>MAN further ruled that imposing the rate increase on only Band &#8220;A&#8221; feeders while excluding other bands constituted discrimination against such consumers.<\/p>\n<p>It then stated that the defendants must follow administrative tariff review procedures before implementing the April and May Supplementary Orders.<\/p>\n<p>NERC opposed to the litigation, claiming that MAN&#8217;s case is an abuse of court processes because it was brought hastily and prematurely without due process of law.<\/p>\n<p>Band A clients are premium customers who receive no government assistance. However, they are guaranteed at least 20 hours of electricity per day.<\/p>\n<p>Manufacturers in this group of consumers said that their tariffs had tripled to N209.50 per kilowatt-hour, severely increasing production costs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A Federal High Court in Lagos has dismissed a complaint brought by the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria challenging the execution of the Abuja power Distribution Company and 11 companies&#8217; Band A power rate revision. According to a statement released on Thursday by the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission, the verdict was handed on Monday. According to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":28509,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[172],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-51466","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"aioseo_notices":[],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51466","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51466"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51466\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51468,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51466\/revisions\/51468"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28509"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abujacityjournal.com\/livenews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}