Public concessionaires with softer budget constraints are usually allowed to show losses, thus reducing the need to cross-subsidise (Zerriffi, 2007). However, as the current rural electrification strategy could well lead to rapidly rising electricity tariffs, the tariff impact of LpT was limited to 8%, which in turn strongly affected the concessionaires’ ability to proceed with rural electrification. In fact, since 2005 there have been twelve cases of concessionaires that had to interrupt their rural electrification programmes before reaching universal access because of this restriction (Instituto Acende Brasil, 2007a).