Business News Americas reports, “Chile’s sanitation services regulator SISS is bringing sanctions against water utility Aguas del Valle for a norovirus outbreak that occurred in Coquimbo region’s city of Ovalle during the first week of September, according to a SISS press release. Samples of the plant’s potable water failed to show signs of the norovirus, but the Limarí River held the same bacteria that were found in more than 3,000 people who suffered infection. SISS is sanctioning Aguas del Valle for failing to purify discharges into the river on September 3 and 10. The regulator says that the outbreak could have been avoided if the water utility would have sufficiently tested the water.”

There is a connection back to the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan, which administers the pensions for 178,000 public school teachers, principals and school administrators, and pays pensions to 117,000 retirees.

In 2011, the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan increased its ownership of Esval from 69.4 percent to 95 percent. Esval is the third largest water utility in Chile and operates in Valparaiso and through Aguas del Valle and Servicios Sanitarios Las Vegas Limitada in Coquimbo. It has about 665,000 customers.

This past March, Estrategia reported (in Spanish) that Jose Luis Murillo Collado would become the chief executive officer of Esval and Aguas del Valle that month. At that time, Esval and Aguas del Valle president Jorge Lesser said Murillo would “continue the long-term project that has Ontario Teachers Pension Plan for both companies, aimed at maintaining operational excellence, in line with recognized service quality standards developed by the Canadian pension fund in all its businesses worldwide.”

In February 2010, Blue Planet Project founder Maude Barlow stated, “‘I deeply believe that if ordinary teachers in Ontario knew and understood that their hard-earned pension funds — public pension funds — were being used to undermine public services in other countries, they would be outraged.”

Since then, we have been calling on the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan to divest from for-profit water utilities in Chile and for the ownership of these private, for-profit water utilities to be fully transferred back to public control, especially given water and sanitation have been recognized as human rights by the United Nations.

The annual meeting of the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan usually takes place in April in Toronto, and that would provide a good opportunity to raise Chile’s sanction against Aguas del Valle and broader concerns once again to their attention.