The Nationalist Party will be taking the government to court over overbilling in water and electricity rates, PN leader Bernard Grech announced on Monday
He reiterated the PN’s pledge that a future PN government will return all the extra payments families have been paying over the years. “This is institutionalised theft,” he said.
He was speaking in Siggiewi during the party’s low-key Independence Day celebrations.
A draft report by the Auditor General found overbilling by ARMS was costing consumers €6.5 million in “extra charges”. Even former Prime Minister Joseph Muscat had acknowledged the overbilling and promised to rectify it.
Last year, hundreds of people turned up at the PN headquarters with their electricity bills as the PN began its exercise to calculate how much people were being “robbed” in the way utility tariffs were being calculated.
“They charged a man because he stole a can of tuna but the ministers who have been robbing the people of thousands through their utility bills still roam around free,” Grech said.
He referred to a court case in July where a court ruled that ARMS, the company that bills consumers for water and electricity, breached the law when it issued bills for two clients on a pro-rata basis rather than on an annual cumulative consumption basis.
The court ordered the utility company to revise their account from 2017 and refund Cordina and Polidano the amount they have overpaid since.
Since 2010, ARMS has been issuing bi-monthly bills using a staggered calculation system. The first 2,000 units of electricity are charged at one rate and further consumption at higher rates.
For every kWh of the first 2,000kWh consumed in a year, residents should be charged 10.47c and then pay 12.98c for every kWh for the next 4,000kWh, 16.07c per unit on the next 4,000kWh and so on.
However, ARMS splits up this allocation pro rata according to the number of bills a consumer receives in the same year. This means that if a residence is billed every two months, the first 2,000 units are split between six bills, amounting to an allocation of 333 units per bill at 10.47c per unit.
If a residence consumes fewer than 333 units in a two-month billing period, the remaining units at the cheaper rate are not brought forward to the subsequent bills. The allocation is therefore lost.
Grech said the PN was standing up to this abuse and will be taking the matter to court. It created a website where people can send their bills.
He spoke about the vision of former prime minister George Borg Olivier who started to shape the country’s future. He said the theme chosen for this year’s independence celebrations is the quality of life that everyone deserves. He said prices were skyrocketing and people were finding it difficult to make ends meet. He insisted that the country had to invest in youths and their education and help them build their future.
He said that despite claims that out-of-stock medicines was a thing of the past, Grech said people were not finding the medicines they needed but generic medicines which were not good enough.
Turning to the police force, he said there was an exodus of people because officers were fed up of their conditions and were leaving the force. He mentioned an example of someone who was just two years away from a full pension but could not take it any longer and left.
The event was also addressed by PN MPs Mark Anthony Sammut and Paula Mifsud Bonnici.