I’ve been wrestling with this conundrum since the middle of last week.

That was when Minister for Energy Konrad Mizzi broke the news that a thousand smart meters – installed in private residences and business premises – have, for the past three years, been doctored to display only a fifth of the actual power consumption.

We were also told that those responsible would be given six weeks from Monday 24 February to come clean by paying back what they stole plus a 10% penalty and all would be forgiven and perhaps forgotten.

No charges will be pressed and no names will be made public.

Those three years meant a loss of €30 million a year to the State’s revenue.

In simpler terms, this meant that, on average, each residence and business premises was getting away with €30,000 a year in stolen power. A consumer with such a huge appetite for power is surely no ordinary household, at least not in Malta; maybe in the sun-drenched leafy neighbourhoods of Beverly Hills but surely not in Malta.

A day or so later, the Minister repeated this “thousand” figure and went further by revealing that the scam first came to light last October.

Hot on Mr Mizzi’s heels came the Prime Minister, who waded into what was to become a fray. He said that the number of people on the fiddle amounted to much more than a thousand and the list was growing with each passing day.

It was here that I was stumped: Prime Minister Muscat seemed to know more about this than Mr Mizzi, his Minister for Energy.

Until then, I had thought that the Prime Minister got his info from the Energy Minister. That whatever the Prime Minister knew or said in this regard was second-hand, courtesy of Minister Mizzi. But there we have it:  the Prime Minister putting the Minister “to rights”.

Which sticks in the throat like a sliver of bone: Mr Mizzi, with his polished style to boot, always seemed on the ball and up to snuff. A number-cruncher natural who took in his stride anything in the way of figures one threw at him and now the Prime Minister is unwittingly telling us that his new-found whiz kid stumbled on the simplest of four-digit numbers.

 Minister Mizzi must have been agonizing---haunted and probably losing sleep--over this figure of “one thousand equals 30 million three times over” since last October, and here we have the Prime Minister feeling the need to step in and pull him up by his bootstraps.

Yes, re-booting his Minister.

Which doesn’t bode well for Minister Mizzi. For if he, as the Prime Minister is implying, came a cropper over the simplest of four-digit numbers,  one shudders to think what a tangle Mr Mizzi got himself into when he delved into those figures that threw up 140,000 cubic metres of LNG cheek-by-jowl to the Delimara power station.

Why is the Prime Minister making out his top-notch Energy Minister to be such a booby in full public glare?

Electrical or solar, as long as it is illuminating, can anyone throw a light?

Joe Genovese

Birkirkara