Save Brezna Civic Initiative Warns CGES Shareholders: An International Energy Hub in Brezna Will Lead to Disaster

Representatives of the civic initiative “Save Brezna” today, during the extraordinary session of the Shareholders’ Assembly of the Montenegrin Electricity Transmission System CGES, distributed a written warning to shareholders stating that they would bear legal, criminal, financial, and reputational consequences if they continue with plans to build a major international energy hub in the center of the village of Brezna, the only village in northern Montenegro that is still being populated and developed.

As a reminder, an extraordinary session of the CGES Shareholders’ Assembly is being held today, attended by representatives of the Italian company Terna Rete Elettrica Nazionale S.p.A., which holds around 22 percent of the shares, the Serbian company Elektromreža Srbije, with 15 percent, and small shareholders with a total of around 7 percent of the shares.

In the letter distributed by the residents of Brezna to the shareholders, entitled “Formal Warning to the Shareholders’ Assembly Prior to Deciding on the Statute and the New Management Structure of the Company – SS Brezna 400/110/35 kV Project,” it is stated, among other things, that on 25 February they submitted to CGES a formal request for the urgent relocation of the future international energy hub, warning that those who continue to “lock in” the location in Brezna will bear individual responsibility for what they describe as certain consequences.

“To the formal request submitted to CGES, all members of the Board of Directors, and the shareholders, we have received no response to date. For almost a year now, ever since we learned of CGES’s intention to destroy our lives, future, property, and tourism facilities by building heavy energy infrastructure in the heart of our village, we have been collecting documentation, providing evidence, and warning domestic and international addresses about the certain catastrophic consequences if they persist with this location. CGES is not only gambling with the lives of an entire human community, but also with the security and safety of the international energy system, because the geotechnical structure of the land is such that building such a facility at this location carries an enormous risk of collapse, subsidence, and a catastrophic outcome. The existing smaller substation has already been sinking and deteriorating for almost a decade, and despite numerous attempts, CGES has failed to remediate it, because the ground keeps ‘reopening,’” the Save Brezna Civic Initiative states.

Residents of Brezna walked out of consultations: CGES is mocking local communities while building 400 kV transmission lines across their land and homes

Save Brezna filed a criminal complaint with the Special State Prosecutor’s Office against CGES and ENOVA: They endangered the energy system of Montenegro, the region, and the EU

Save Brezna: Aware that they are destroying an entire village – CGES falsified data for the EBRD in order to obtain a EUR 28 million loan for the substation in Brezna

They add that the project documentation for this international strategic energy facility does not contain the basic elements required under European Union standards.

“Brezna 400 kV substation has been designed as an international node: international 400 kV transmission lines and the connection of several dozen renewable energy projects from different directions. Montenegro is already interconnected with Italy via an undersea cable, and additional 400 kV links are planned, including a new submarine cable and at least two more cross-border 400 kV lines, Brezna–Sarajevo and Brezna–Gacko. In such an architecture, a failure or degradation of the stability of a node on compromised ground can produce: cross-border transmission disturbances, N-1/N-2 operating regimes, cascading outages, regional energy instability, and European consequences due to interconnections and market flows, especially for Italy’s energy system. This is why the EU legal framework for impact and risk assessment is applied strictly to major energy infrastructure projects (the EIA Directive),” the Save Brezna Civic Initiative states.

They recall that they discovered, as they claim, that CGES and the consulting company ENOVA from Bosnia and Herzegovina falsified the project documentation on the basis of which CGES obtained loan funds for this project from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), and that in the official and publicly available documentation they claimed that there was not a single house or business facility within a 2 km radius of the planned location.

“There are more than 150 structures within a 2 km radius alone, and many more in the village as a whole, and all of them are under threat. This indicates a clear intention to conceal our existence and avoid responsibility for consequences they are fully aware of. After our complaint to the EBRD, and after submitting extensive documentation and arguments, the Bank’s independent accountability mechanism, IPAM, was activated. Despite everything, CGES continues to ignore us and behave as if we do not exist, and we have reasonable grounds to suspect that personal interests are at play here—those of a small number of decision-makers within the CGES system, the relevant ministries and the local government, as well as several private companies—for whose sake they are prepared to destroy an entire village and everything we have. The extensive documentation we have collected so far, and continue to collect, is in the possession of our legal team. They are already destroying our lives, because instead of living peacefully and going about our work, we have to fight to save the village and its future. If they persist and move forward with these works, they will first have to arrest all of us, and even if they do so, they will pay millions in compensation for the damage they cause, while the signatories in the chain of decision-making will also bear criminal responsibility. All the documentation we have, and the irrefutable facts, give us every right to say that CGES is preparing Montenegro’s own ‘canopy’ in Brezna, and if they persist, the European Public Prosecutor’s Office will deal with them,” the Save Brezna Civic Initiative concludes.