Supreme Court Takes Control of Government Lawsuits Against LUMA
The High Court set a schedule in the case, after the private operator's attempt to take the litigation to federal court failed.
By NotiCel | Jun 30, 2026
The Supreme Court set a 15-day deadline for the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority (PREPA) and the Public-Private Partnerships Authority (P3A) to state their position on whether this forum should directly resolve their lawsuits against the private operator of the electrical grid, LUMA Energy. This, in light of the counterclaims that the operator submitted in the forum where the cases currently are, the Court of First Instance. This reactivation of Puerto Rico's courts in this dispute occurs after Judge Laura Taylor Swain refused to retain jurisdiction over the claims after LUMA failed to get them heard in federal court instead of state court. The controversy over whether jurisdiction remains alive is in the First Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston, where LUMA has the support of the Financial Oversight and Management Board (FOMB). But while that is resolved, federal courts refused to keep the cases on hold, so they referred them to state court to proceed here. When that happened, LUMA filed a counterclaim arguing that the government's lawsuits are motivated by electoral political purposes and that Governor Jenniffer González Colón and the plaintiff public corporations have acted in bad faith, with intentional fraud and recklessly, to the total detriment of the public interest. Following a campaign promise that LUMA would cease to be the private operator of the grid, the government filed two lawsuits that, with some differences in grounds, essentially make the same point: that when the Pierluisi Urrutia administration extended the supplementary contract under which LUMA operates on the island while PREPA's bankruptcy concludes, it did so illegally because it did not have the required vote on the P3A board. LUMA has called the lawsuits "nonsense," accused the government of acting against its own acts, and warned that contract cancellation would cause costs of $4.5 billion and "chaos" in the electrical grid. Once PREPA and the P3A respond, the Supreme Court will decide whether to intervene directly in the lawsuits and also whether to consolidate them. LUMA strengthened its legal team with two former Supreme Court justices, former Chief Justice Federico Hernández Denton and former Associate Justice Edgardo Rivera García. They also advanced that they expect to conduct a broad discovery process in which they identify interventions by the Secretary of Governance, Francisco Domenech Fernández, in the proceedings regarding their contract.
