Engie will grant in November a discount of 100 euros on average per customer benefiting from the energy check, indicated the general manager of the group Catherine MacGregor in an interview published Thursday on the site of the Parisian.
The discount will be proportional to the amount of the energy check, and the cost of this measure amounts to 90 million euros for Engie, for 880,000 customers concerned, confirmed the group to AFP.
“We are aware of the inflationary reality and concerned about the difficulties encountered by our customers, whether they are households or industrialists”, underlined Ms. MacGregor in The Parisian.
Support fund for SMEs
The group, which is due to present its results on Friday, has also set up a support fund of 60 million euros for small and medium-sized enterprises, “which will allow them to have access to the guarantees they need to buy energy”, or even “payment facilities when they struggle to pay the bills”.
This gesture does not respond to the debate launched in Parliament in July on the establishment of a tax on the excess profits made by large groups, says the leader. TotalEnergies had announced for example a discount of 20 euro cents per liter of fuel at the pump between September and November in all its service stations, then 10 cents per liter for the rest of the year.
“It is above all a civic gesture, to help our customers. (…) Engie does not produce gas, but buys it and resells it at the market price. So there’s no excess profit there,” Ms. MacGregor explained. “In electricity, certain assets, notably our nuclear power plants in Belgium, have indeed benefited from high energy prices. They are subject to a system of taxes and redistribution of profits which is already very well defined. This allows us to return a significant proportion of these profits to the states concerned, ”said the leader.