NEWS | Wednesday, 28 January 2009

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Karl Schembri
Trade unions yesterday announced they will be meeting the Malta Resources Authority for a last ditch attempt at getting the new water and electricity tariffs revised, before announcing “new measures”.
The 11 unions convened at the Malta Union of Teachers headquarters yesterday morning – where incidentally the electricity was cut off until the end of the press conference – to announce that on Friday they will be meeting with the energy regulator.
“We will go to the meeting, but if the regulator’s position remains as it is today, then we’ll have a problem,” said MUT president John Bencini, who insisted that the bills that had already been sent to households were wrong and had to be revised. “The regulator did not do its job and left it up to the prime minister to decide the bills... he was nowhere to be seen. Maybe on Friday he’ll explain to us how he got to agree with the government’s tariffs, and we might realise that all of us the 11 unions are crazy. We’ll see.”
General Workers’ Union secretary-general Tony Zarb said they will be meeting the regulator but they still expected to meet the prime minister in a bid to conclude this saga.
Outlining their concerns, the unions slammed the regulator for approving the legal notice with new tariffs before even having reviewed the government’s assumptions on energy consumption. In fact, the Deloitte audit report into the government’s workings came out a full month after the legal notice was published as bills were already being sent to consumers.
Speaking on behalf of the unions, University lecturers union (UMASA) president Victor Buttigieg attacked the resources authority for ignoring consumers’ rights when it approved the new tariffs without checking the government’s assumptions.
The Deloitte report itself is a “preliminary review,” Buttigieg said, and did not go into the specifics of the new bills. Nor did it treat water tariffs.
“How can the regulator approve the new tariffs if the Deloitte report is still ‘work in progress’?” Buttigeg asked, quoting the auditors’ own admission in their report.
The assumptions upon which the tariffs were based had yet to be verified, including the data relating to the number of persons per household, the costs of Enemalta’s inefficiencies, and figures about billing and consumption.
“How can the regulator claim that tariffs are fair when you don’t have all this information verified?” he said. “This is especially more important in the light of a monopolistic environment. Were it a competitive environment, the market would somehow adjust itself, but this is a monopoly.”
The unions also pointed out that the prime minister’s claim that 73% of families will benefit from the eco reduction is yet another falsehood. According to KPMG, 73% of accounts – not families – qualify for the eco reduction. This includes empty houses, holiday flats and summer residences.

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