Dear Editor,
In St. Maarten, GEBE is shorthand for frustration: the outages, billing mess, and infamous fuel clause. People can only take so much. However, the story doesn’t start or end with GEBE.
Behind every bill are two private monopolies that control the island’s energy and water lifelines: SOL Antilles N.V., the only fuel importer, and Seven Seas Water, the exclusive supplier of water purified by desalination. Together, they operate without competition, and their costs flow unchecked onto utility bills.
The government’s own tariff evaluation, finalized in April 2025 by the Bureau Telecommunication and Post (BTP) with support from the Regulatory Authority of Curaçao (RAC), confirmed this problem. The redacted report showed that between 2022 and 2024, GEBE over-collected through its fuel clauses. In regulated markets, excess charges are refunded to the people. In St. Maarten, they disappear into cash flows, with no questions asked.
Take SOL’s 30-year exclusive contract: it locks GEBE into buying oil only from its terminals, with no alternatives available. BTP/RAC reviewers found invoices padded with unexplained “throughput fees”, premiums and losses, with no regulator verifying a single one. With no price cap, SOL effectively writes the bill, and the public pays it. To make matters worse, GEBE’s aging engines, most of which are well past their intended lifespan, are burning more fuel than modern equipment, further inflating costs.
The same story plays out with water. Seven Seas’ 2007 “take-or-pay” contract forced St. Maarten to buy fixed volumes of desalinated water, whether it was needed or not.
After Hurricane Irma in 2017, the country had to pay millions for unused water. An amendment in 2018 lowered the contracted volume, saving about 4 million guilders per year for three years, roughly 12 million in total. However, the monopoly structure remained intact. In 2023, the deal was extended through 2027 because GEBE was still not ready to produce its own water supply. Officials publicized annual savings of about US $400,000. While significant on its own, this amount is modest compared to the earlier multi-million-guilder savings and does little to offset the inflated costs that households and businesses continue to bear.
People remain trapped in a one-sided arrangement where electricity has long been misallocated, and businesses pay four times more than households do. Faced with growing criticism, GEBE tried to defend its position by hiring Reporting, Controlling, and Regulatory Consulting B.V. (RCRC) to produce a counter-review released on July 31, 2025.
RCRC cautioned that simply cutting the fuel clause could destabilize GEBE, estimating a revenue hit of 2.6 cents per kilowatt hour, or XCG 9.2 million, annually. Their warning recalled Curaçao’s 2011 mistake, where regulators forced Aqualectra into steep tariff cuts, only for the company to collapse within two years. Curaçao’s government had to inject millions to rescue it from bankruptcy, and the people ended up repaying the so-called relief through higher bill payments. This is a textbook case of how quick fixes and political tampering can backfire. No subsidy, town hall, or empty promise will solve this problem. Subsidies only recycle taxpayers’ money; they do not cut costs; they simply shuffle them. No town hall can renegotiate monopoly contracts. Real relief comes only from structural reforms.
The BTP/RAC evaluation provided 13 solid recommendations, of which several were noteworthy. Generator fuels (LFO/HFO) must be brought under the same price controls as gasoline and LPG, with every SOL invoice being independently verified. A correction mechanism should be introduced so that over- or undercharging is automatically adjusted on future bills. The water fuel clause must be redesigned to ensure that electricity costs are transparent and fairly allocated. Most importantly, independent regulatory oversight must be established to end utility self-regulation. One more step that costs nothing but political will is to publish supplier contracts, redacted if necessary, so the public finally knows what it is paying for.
While St. Maarten clings to played-out political grandstanding, other islands have taken steps toward energy diversification. Curaçao strengthened its regulators in 2011 after Aqualectra collapsed due to political interference. Aruba began forming global partnerships in 2012 to roll out wind and solar projects and reduce its dependence on fossil fuels. Barbados broke monopoly markups in 2015 by introducing competitive fuel procurement policies. Jamaica went further, launching renewable energy auctions in 2016; by 2019, renewables already supplied 17% of its grid and are on track to reach 20% by 2030. The lesson is clear:
transparency, competition, and renewables are not theory; they are proven practices.
Keeping GEBE chained to fossil fuels while sidelining renewables guarantees higher future costs for the public. If leaders fear “losing control” of GEBE through privatization, then they should form strategic alliances with private partners that bring the technical expertise needed to modernize. The choice is not complicated: either keep paying inflated bills under a broken system or finally modernize the energy sector with real regulation, competition, and renewables.
The shadows behind your GEBE bills are not simple accounting errors; they are monopolies protected by law, one-sided contracts, and political cowardice. As long as these issues remain untouched, any talk of relief is nothing more than a performance. True relief means rewriting the rules of the game. Anything less is political theatre.
Angelique Remy-Chittick
Financial Strategist & Consultant @Financial.ish
