PUERTO RICO: “A federal judge has rejected a $550 million loan to keep Puerto Rico’s troubled electric utility in operation, threatening the island with more power outages at a time when it is trying to recover from last summer’s devastating hurricanes.
Judge Laura Taylor Swain said Thursday [2-15-18] at a hearing in U.S. District Court in New York that the cash-strapped power utility hadn’t looked hard enough for alternative funding before seeking court approval of a loan from the island’s central government. The utility, known as Prepa, should have shown ‘far more robust’ efforts to secure financing from a third party rather than going to the government for a loan, she said… Prepa is in desperate need of funding to maintain restoration work on the island’s power grid and to prevent additional blackouts.
Todd Filsinger, Prepa’s chief financial adviser, told the court Thursday that the government-run utility must have additional financing in place by next Thursday or parts of the Island would begin to go dark within a matter of days…
The utility’s cash balances have dwindled as hundreds of thousands of customers remain without service months after Maria devastated the island. Offline customers aren’t paying electric bills, eating into Prepa’s revenues while construction bills pile up.”
-Tom Corrigan, “Federal Judge Rejects Government Loan for Puerto Rico Utility,” The Wall Street Journal online, Feb. 15, 2018 08:26pm