Two months before of the electricity price hike, two of Bulgaria's three main electricity providers, E.ON Bulgaria and EVN Bulgaria, started actively collecting bills that their customers did not pay on time.

E.ON Bulgaria, a subsidiary of the German electricity company E.ON, is servicing the residents of north-eastern Bulgaria, the regions of Varna and Gorna Oryahovitsa. On April 7, E.ON said in a statement that one third of its household customers, who have unpaid bills, were from Varna. Nearly half of them were more than two months late with their payments.

In the coming weeks, E.ON will start to cut the electricity supply to customers with overdue payments.

On April 14, E.ON spokesperson Daria Maneva told The Sofia Echo that the company would cut electricity to customers who did not pay their bills for more than two months or who owed more than 100 leva.

E.ON told The Sofia Echo that in cases where subscribers failed to pay their bills on time, the company would use all legal means to collect the money, including freezing bank accounts or other assets and start court proceedings. These methods helped the company collect about 450 000 leva in 2007 and 355 000 leva in the first three months of 2008. Currently, the company has about 950 lawsuits to collect two million leva.

The company said that it started the campaign Regular Payer in February, offering all customers who pay their bills on time to win an 100 leva voucher for free electricity.
Second largest local electricity utility EVN Bulgaria, a fully-owned subsidiary of Austrian company EVN AG, covers south-eastern Bulgaria, including the cities of Plovdiv and Stara Zagora.

On April 14, company spokesperson Kroum Kosev told The Sofia Echo that EVN launched a campaign that aims to prevent additional costs for restoring electricity supply after it has been cut.

EVN gives its clients 10 days to pay their bills every month, with another 10-day grace period, during which the company charges interest on late payments. If the bill still has not been paid by the end of that period, EVN usually cuts the power supply.

Before power utilities were privatised, the Roma population across the country would not pay their electricity bills and owed huge amounts to the state. This inheritance was biggest in Plovdiv's Roma district of Stolipinovo.

Kosev declined to disclose the total amount owed to EVN, but he did say that Stolipinovo alone had an outstanding debt of 12.1 million leva.

The company started a programme to decrease the amounts owed by Roma. In 2007, EVN started the modernisation of the power grid in Stolipinovo, which cost four million leva.

The goal was to change the entire infrastructure in areas "with a low living standard", such as Plovdiv's Sheker Mahala and Stolipinovo neighbourhoods, replacing old power meters with remote-controlled devices. The efforts improved the quality of the service considerably and increased revenue collection, EVN said. 

In Stolipinovo, 187m of power lines and 17 transformers were repalced or upgraded. Some of the transformers had to be built from scratch, as they have been burned or destroyed in the past, EVN said.

By end-2007, the company had installed 6300 "modern power meters with remote control installed on special panels at a height convenient for tracking out their readings," the company said. Each year, EVN spends half a million leva to guard the power meters.

In June 2007, the company completed the upgrade of the power grid in Plovdiv's other Roma district, Sheker Mahala, replacing 10km of power lines, four transformers and 900 power meters, the company said.

The investments made by the company in the two Roma districts did not go in vain. As of April 14, about 80 per cent of the customers from Sheker Mahala and Stolipinovo paid their current electricity bills on time.

"The company also started a campaign on informing the residents of the district about their consumer's rights and duties," EVN said.

"Similar and smaller projects have already been launched in other areas with low living standards in south-eastern Bulgaria region."