Emmanuel Macron announced Thursday that all craftsmen and very small businesses hit by rising energy prices would be able to renegotiate “excessive contracts” with their electricity supplier in January. “For our butchers, our craftsmen, for all of our very small businesses, all those who have negotiated excessive contracts”, “what we are going to ask energy suppliers from now on is to return to each (of them) and to renegotiate them”, declared the head of state during the traditional ceremony of the Epiphany cake at the Élysée.
The ministers concerned will receive the electricity suppliers
“All these contracts which are above the reference prices given at the end of last year by the Energy Regulation Commission”, that is to say around 280 euros per megawatt/hour, “they will be renegotiated in January,” he said. “I, like you, are tired of having people who, on the basis of the crisis, make excessive profits,” he said.
According to his entourage, the ministers concerned will receive from Friday, at the request of the president, the electricity suppliers to ask them to implement this request. “We are going to support all VSEs, all those with fewer than ten employees, on this affair”, assured Emmanuel Macron, while the government had announced in recent days measures targeted at bakers, often stifled by rising costs.
Emmanuel Macron in this sense indicated that the prefectures would receive “reinforcement” so that “all those who are faced with anxieties (…) can express them”. “We are going to take people’s names and we are going to set up a small alert system”, he said, stressing that “many of our craftsmen, our VSEs, have other things to do than go search Internet sites for absolutely illegible circulars or incomprehensible tables.”