The Easy Line telephonic system of paying for calls is a blessing for whoever is responsible to honour telephone bills. Especially more so for those landlords who lease out their premises on comparatively short term, and prefer to retain in their name, the relative account.

This problematic necessity now has been surmounted. Nowadays, one seldom hears of tenants escaping their landlord, leaving telephone bills unpaid. However, unfortunately, such mean and despicable cheaters still run away leaving water and electricity bills unpaid. I have no doubt that such unpaid bills – running into hundreds of thousands of liri – have to be honoured by landlords, and therefore are declared by them as bad debts in their income tax return, which ultimately means less income tax paid to the Commissioner of Inland Revenue, as they are allowable liabilities.

Therefore, it is in the government’s interest that this problem is tackled and solved in the shortest time possible.

I have been lumped with several of such cheating tenants, that move from one residence to another, living just for three or four months in each of them, without paying a single cent for the consumption of water and electricity. On this island, everyone knows everybody else, yet I have had only one instance when I managed to track down such cheating tenants. Court proceedings, which I instituted against a cheating foreign couple, have already taken a year, even though the case is being heard by the Small Claims’ Tribunal and have already cost me more than the bill left unpaid by the said tenants.

More often than not such cheaters are experts of the game; some of them are even equipped with sizeable carriers which they tow behind their cars for transporting away their belongings quickly, without having to hire transport, so as not to disclose the location of their next hired premises. They prefer living like nomads, fleeing from one residence to another, hounded as indeed they are, by water and electricity bills, spurred on by their success in consuming water and electricity absolutely free of charge. The consumption on such bills is always substantial, as the relative consumer would be scheming to avoid paying it. Such tenants never resort to estate agents, to avoid their fees; they find the premises from advertisements.

The deposit they are made to pay initially to cover contingencies is easily absorbed by a couple of late rental payments. When they make up their minds to leave, they avoid confronting their tenant by just dropping the key of the hired premises in their letterbox, and informing him/her by telephone that they have left. Sometimes they do not even inform the landlord that they have vacated the premises.

If a landlord were to transfer temporarily the relative account from his/her name to that of his/her tenant, it would create more problems than it solves. Besides incurring considerable expenses by the transfers that would have to be made with every lease, one has to cope with the hassle and problems generated by the long time that one has to wait until the transfers are affected. Moreover, as Enemalta Corporation would be facing the same problem of chasing such outstanding bills, it would be reluctant to reconnect its service at those premises from which it has failed to collect revenue due for services rendered.

Unfortunately, such despicable cheaters are in all probability, immune from police prosecution, because of the nature of their crime, hence subject to Civil Court proceedings – therefore, police authorities would not be responsible to trace the whereabouts of such swindlers.

However, such fraud can easily be checked once and for all, by the introduction of an electricity meter, which would be activated in the same way as the Easy Line telephone system, which basically means paying for the call before it is made. With such a meter, Enemalta would not only reduce losses but also improve profitability, as it would receive revenue in anticipation of its service. By the same token the Inland Revenue Department would also stand to gain, because there would be less bad debts declared by commercial telephone owners, such as the swindled landlords, hence more income tax would be paid by them.

If such an electricity meter exists, but perhaps Enemalta is not at present in a position to incur the expense of supplying and installing it, in replacement of all existing meters, then consumers should be given the option of installing it against payment.

In this way the burden of footing a water and electricity bill deliberately left unpaid by runaway tenants, would at least, be substantially reduced until one day, a water meter would be invented to function on the basis of the Easy Line telephonic system.

When this happens, such cheating tenants would have finally met their Waterloo.

Joseph J. Xuereb

SAN GWANN