One of Malta’s most defining energy sagas took an altogether definitive turn this week, when a court determined that people have in fact been overcharged on their electricity bills.

A court this week found that a billing method used by Automated Revenue Management Services Ltd (ARMS) resulted in the illegal over-charging of a Lija resident on his electricity bills between 2016 and 2017.

Judge Anna Felice ruled that the way in which ARMS calculated the electricity bill of Darren Cordina and Melvin Polidano was illegal, finding that the computations which ARMS used to work out the pair’s electricity bill was on a pro-rata basis, rather than on cumulative consumption – meaning that they had been overcharged by ARMS in their electricity bill.

The case will no doubt set a major legal precedent for similar cases where consumers are demanding refunds for what they have been overcharged.

It also serves as definitive confirmation of a matter which the media, The Malta Independent included, has been saying and reporting on for a number of years now.

A National Audit Office report published at the end of last year had already found that a significant number of accounts which were analysed had discrepancies which meant that consumers across had been overcharged by €4.6 million because of the way ARMS was calculated electricity bills.

So the question now is, how does one go forward from here?

The first step has to be a change in the way ARMS calculates its electricity bills. Energy Minister Miriam Dalli promised this back in January, and reiterated it this week after this judgement was handed down.  The legal changes haven’t been implemented yet, but Dalli said that when they are they will cover the whole of 2022 retroactively.

The second point however concerns compensation: an area where the government has seemingly been far less willing to budge.

The fact of the matter is that people – average citizens like you and me – have been knowingly robbed: and we say knowingly because this is an issue which has been in the public domain for years, and because the average citizen has no choice other than to pay their electricity bill – whether they like it or not.

What’s worse is that the people have been robbed by a government entity, and that the same government now appears to be unwilling to pay that money back.

There are two correct options in this matter: either the government offers the necessary compensation to all those who have been overcharged, or the people take matters into their own hands to get back what is rightfully theirs.

This could be in the form of separate legal cases, or even a class action lawsuit: anything to ensure that the people get back what is rightfully theirs and what they have been overcharged.

We wouldn’t usually advocate for such drastic action, but it is high time that the people stop being robbed – and furthermore – are given back what is rightfully theirs.