[attach id=494911 size="medium"]Fredrick Azzopardi. Photo: Darrin Zammit Lupi[/attach]
Almost half of the 1,000 electricity smart-meter tampering cases reported two years ago turned out to be cases of conventional theft, Enemalta executive chairman Fredrick Azzopardi said yesterday.
In fact, just over half of the suspected tampering cases had either benefited from an amnesty or were referred to the police for action. The rest of the cases either proved to be a false alarm or consisted of more conventional forms of electricity theft which did not involve any tampering with the highly sophisticated devices.
Details on the crackdown on electricity theft were given yesterday by State energy company Enemalta, which announced it had recouped €30 million over the last two years.
On February 11, 2014, Energy Minister Konrad Mizzi called a news conference announcing the discovery of a scam involving what he termed as organised theft of electricity through tampering with smart meters located at private residences and business establishments. Dr Mizzi said there were about 1,000 cases, involving a number of Enemalta employees.
A few days later, the government announced a six-week amnesty period, at the end of which 428 consumers came forward, meaning that an estimated 600 cases could potentially face prosecution. However, up to a year ago, only 25 people had been arraigned, including a number of company employees.
Asked if further arraignments had been made, Mr Azzopardi said yesterday that 100 cases had been referred to the police in connection with the smart-meter tampering scandal.
Pressed for an explanation on the discrepancy, he said the list of cases mentioned in 2014 had been an estimate of the “potential” number of tampered meters.
“We have gone through the majority of the list but not all of them were necessarily meters that had been tampered with. We have flagged over 800 cases of theft, close to 850,” Mr Azzopardi said.
“We have referred about 100 cases to the police but we have reached about 1,300 agreements with consumers,” he added.
The settlements included other cases not directly related to meter tampering but still amounting to theft. Mr Azzopardi said that, over the last two years, the company had concluded 1,220 cases of electricity theft. In each case, the consumers who were caught cheating agreed to pay the stolen amount, as well as the applicable penalties and interests.
He noted that some cases had been left pending for years, during which time the relevant files had been left to gather dust because no action was ever taken.
In the last two years, Enemalta employees identified 760 cases of theft, a 25 per cent rise over the previous four years combined.
Mr Azzopardi said that non-technical losses (thefts) had been reduced to 2.85 per cent from 6.7 per cent in 2012. Consequently, the amount of money not yet recouped by Enemalta amounted to about €8 million.