Hoy headlined that President Leonel Fernández took advantage of the Christmas visit of former U.S. Secretary of State and business consultant, Henry Kissinger, to explain the case of the Smith-Enron power plant. Kissinger is an advisor to Enron, a major energy consortium located in Houston. A former U.S. soldier, Donald Mitchell Smith, formed an alliance with Enron to win a concession from the Balaguer administration for the installation and sale of energy to the state electricity utility, Corporación Dominicana de Electricidad. The contract is onerous to the state. Clauses such as that the state has to pay for installed capacity and not energy supplied affect the CDE. The plant has produced well under its 185,000 installed capacity since its first days of operation and has been out of service on countless occasions. In the meeting, President Fernández was said to have requested that Kissinger intercede with Enron on behalf of the Dominican government. Hoy newspaper reports that it is likely that a team from Enron in Houston will visit the country in three weeks to inspect the Puerto Plata plant. Hoy reported that Mitchel Smith, who was given the concession by the Balaguer government, formed a company in the British Virgin Islands under the name of Smith Cogeneration International. The company was granted the concession which was signed on 26 July 1993 by its administrator, engineer Marcos Subero. On 2 November of the same year the contract was modified, granting additional benefits to the firm. On 31 August 1994, with the approval of the CDE, Mitchel Smith ceded his contract to Smith-Enron Cogeneration Limited Partnership, a company established in Turks & Caicos Island. On 13 August 1996, the CDE described as a "fiasco" the contract signed between the CDE and Smith-Enron, which called for the construction and operation of a combined cycle power plant in Puerto Plata. The CDE has stated repeatedly that the Smith-Enron plant is its big headache for its unreliable supply of power to the state electricity grid.
