Electricity is not just another household bill. It is the base input cost of the entire economy. When electricity prices rise, the impact is immediate and unavoidable, flowing through every supply chain from food and transport to manufacturing, tourism, healthcare, and education.
For most households and businesses, electricity is not discretionary. It cannot be deferred, negotiated, or meaningfully substituted away. In a monopoly system, consumers do not choose the structure they pay for, they inherit it.
Why governance matters more than price
That is why electricity governance matters. Decisions about how power is generated, priced, financed, and overseen are not technical footnotes. In a monopoly utility with captive consumers, those decisions determine who bears risk, who captures value, and how affordable life and business will be for decades.
In such markets, consumer harm does not arise only from prices. It arises upstream from system design, capital structure, risk allocation, and the presence or absence of meaningful exit, substitution, or self-supply options. For example, harm can be embedded in whether the electricity system is designed around decentralised household generation or around centralised monopoly control, and whether the utility functions primarily as a gatekeeper selling units or as a grid enabler facilitating consumer participation.
Where choice is structurally unavailable, oversight must substitute for market discipline.
Audit as consumer protection, not accounting formality
Audit in this context is not an accounting formality. It is a core consumer-protection safeguard. Independent audit is one of the few mechanisms capable of testing whether monopoly decisions genuinely serve the public interest — or primarily stabilise balance sheets and investor returns while shifting long-term risk onto consumers.
Removing independent audit therefore changes the risk equation. It weakens transparency, narrows accountability, and shifts financial exposure away from investors and onto households, small businesses, and future consumers — through long-dated tariffs, constrained substitution options, and intergenerational cost transfer.
Why foreign shareholding raises the oversight threshold
Good governance in monopoly utilities is not about personalities or politics. It is about system design, accountability, and fairness — especially where consumers cannot exit.
In comparable jurisdictions, independent audit and external scrutiny are strengthened — not removed — once foreign equity, long-term borrowing, and tariff-based cost recovery intersect, reflecting established regulatory norms applied to monopoly utilities in jurisdictions such as Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, consistent with OECD-aligned public-enterprise governance and utility-regulation practice (OECD, 2005; OECD, 2015; World Bank, 2017; UNCTAD, 2021). In such settings, the convergence of monopoly power, foreign shareholding, and consumer captivity is precisely where oversight norms are typically heightened, not relaxed.
Lawful does not mean justified
On paper, the exemption of Energy Fiji Limited from audit under the Audit (Exemption) Regulations 2021, made pursuant to sections 6(1)(b)(i) and 19 of the Audit Act 1969, may fall within the formal authority of the executive. That, however, does not resolve whether the exercise of that power is justified. Lawfulness establishes authority; it does not answer questions of proportionality, necessity, or public-interest justification—particularly where the regulation removes independent Auditor-General oversight from a monopoly utility whose financing and tariff decisions bind consumers for decades, and from which consumers have no practical ability to exit, substitute, or self-supply without bearing punitive cost or access constraints.
The real issue, therefore, lies in the structure of the system rather than in the actions or intentions of individuals.
The risk pathway that demands scrutiny
Accordingly, does the exemption of Energy Fiji Limited from independent audit under the Audit (Exemption) Regulations 2021, when considered in light of its foreseeable effects on transparency, consumer exposure, and long-term risk allocation, amount to an abuse of executive power?
Possibly — if audit exemptions and regulatory settings are being used to:
l lock consumers into long-term tariff recovery paths;
l inflate enterprise valuation ahead of a foreseeable investor exit; and
l limit transparency and consumer choice at precisely the moment financial exposure is being expanded.
From what is publicly visible, all three risks appear live, forming a coherent risk pathway through which transparency is reduced, financial exposure is expanded, and long-term cost recovery is progressively shifted away from capital and onto captive consumers.
Crucially, this risk is not borne by shareholders or advisers, but by households, small businesses, and future consumers—through higher long-term costs, reduced exit and substitution options, and permanent exposure to decisions to which they did not meaningfully consent.
The public-interest test that cannot be avoided
Is the exemption of Energy Fiji Limited from independent audit consistent with good public governance?
No. Not in a monopoly utility, where financing, ownership, and oversight decisions taken today determine affordability, risk allocation, and consumer exposure for generations to come. In such settings, the removal of independent scrutiny weakens—not strengthens—public governance.
A simple public-interest test should therefore apply:
Does this governance and cost structure expand consumer choice over time—or does it permanently narrow it?
If consumer choice is narrowed, accountability must increase—not disappear. A monopoly electricity system that depends on consumer captivity to remain financially viable is like being required to buy water from a single tap, at whatever price is set, because all other wells have been sealed. The system may be financially stable, but the risk and cost are borne entirely by users who have no alternative. By definition, such a structure prioritises revenue certainty over public interest and constitutes a consumer-risk system rather than a consumer-protective one.
Why this falls squarely within consumer-protection and competition oversight
First, in monopoly markets, prices are outcomes — not signals.
Where consumers cannot exit, substitute, or self-supply, prices no longer function as market signals. They reflect cost-recovery decisions embedded in system design, not competitive discipline. Consumer harm therefore arises upstream when:
-debt is loaded onto the balance sheet,
-financial risk is shifted into tariffs, and
-governance safeguards—such as independent audit—are removed.
Second, competition and consumer law addresses misuse of market power, not just price levels.
Globally, competition and consumer regulators are mandated to look beyond headline prices to examine:
-how risk is allocated;
-whether consumer choice is foreclosed;
-whether consumers are rendered structurally captive; and
-whether governance decisions entrench those outcomes over time.
Third, independent audit is a recognised safeguard against structural consumer harm.
Particularly in mixed-ownership or foreign-equity monopoly utilities, independent audit is treated not merely as a financial control, but as a core consumer-protection mechanism—one that ensures transparency, disciplines risk-taking, and tests whether monopoly decisions genuinely serve the public interest.
That is why the question of exempting a monopoly utility from independent audit falls squarely within the remit of consumer-protection and competition oversight.
The minimum lawful remedy
So how should the issue of audit exemption be resolved?
Short answer: Restore full Auditor-General of Fiji oversight immediately.
Independent audit is not a procedural nicety in a monopoly utility; it is a core consumer-protection safeguard. That safeguard was removed not by statute or constitutional mandate, but by ministerial regulation. A regulation can be amended or repealed—and where it undermines transparency in a monopoly trading in an essential public good, it should be.
Restoring Auditor-General oversight does not unwind past transactions, interfere with tariff-setting independence, or assign blame. It simply reinstates the minimum level of independent scrutiny required before further irreversible decisions—long-term borrowing, tariff-based cost recovery, and capital lock-in—are imposed on captive consumers.
Where consumers have no practical ability to exit, substitute, or self-supply, oversight must substitute for market discipline. Allowing a monopoly utility with foreign shareholding and long-dated debt exposure to operate without independent audit breaks that discipline and transfers risk directly to households, businesses, and future consumers.
If the system design and financing strategy are sound, they will withstand independent audit.
If they are not, there is still time to correct course—before consumer harm is permanently embedded.
That is why restoring full Auditor-General oversight is not optional.
It is the minimum lawful remedy.
And that is why these questions deserve public attention — and lawful answers — before higher tariffs are embedded, public debt is entrenched, balance-sheet expansion is locked in, ownership exit is executed, and profits are extracted offshore.
SUNIL CHAND is an engineer and reform strategist with three decades of senior-level experience across manufacturing, regulation, and higher education. He served as Director of Projects at the Fijian Competition and Consumer Commission (2007–2009). The views are his alone.
