Laos investigates executives who oversaw long-delayed hydro dam
Ruling Communist Party publication said state funds for construction of Nam Him Boun dam were embezzled.
Lao authorities are investigating officials responsible for a hydropower dam that is a decade behind schedule in another sign of problems surfacing from the country’s dam-building frenzy.
An official publication of the ruling Communist Party reported on March 20 that a former deputy director of the state electricity company and four other people who were overseeing construction of the Nam Him Boun dam had embezzled state funds.
Construction began in 2013 and was expected to take three years but is now only three-quarters complete, the Party Inspection Magazine said. The company building the dam in central Laos has received US$89 million, which is nearly the total value of the construction contract, despite failing to deliver, it said.
Billions of dollars have been invested over the past two decades in constructing hydro dams on the Mekong River and its tributaries in Laos to export electricity to neighboring countries such as Thailand and Vietnam and as far afield as Singapore.
The unfettered pace of development has continued unabated despite a regional outcry against the likely destruction of freshwater fisheries that are a crucial source of protein and livelihoods for millions. The country of seven million people also suffers regular blackouts during peak demand periods because of a creaky power grid and its contractual obligations to export electricity.
The party publication said the accused include the foreign president of a private company, a former deputy director of state-owned Électricité du Laos, the utility’s former head of dam construction and the former heads and deputy heads of the dam construction project.
It said the government has lost out on revenue because the 30-megawatt dam hasn’t generated electricity as planned. The government is also on the hook for repaying the loan that financed the dam construction and the interest, the report said.
The Lao government has summarized the case and sent it to the Vientiane People’s Prosecutor’s Office, the Communist Party organ said.
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The cost of all the dams built or planned in Laos is about US$40 billion and largely financed by foreign investment, according to Pon Souvannaseng, an associate professor at Bentley University in Massachusetts who researches hydropower in Laos.
Banks in the region have been eager to finance Lao hydro dams because such loans offer higher returns than retail banking and they don’t face obstacles to lending such as binding environmental impact assessments, Pon said.
“These regional banks were able to continuously pump money into project after project after project because they didn’t adhere to international environmental standards,” she told a seminar on Lao hydropower this month.
Emerging problems in the hydropower industry were highlighted, Pon said, by the collapse in 2018 of a saddle dam that was part of larger hydro project under construction in Champasak province.
Billions of cubic feet of water flooded villages downstream in Attapeu province, killing 71 people and displacing more than 14,000 when it wiped out all or part of 19 villages.
Edited by Mike Firn.
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