City council makes breakthrough in electricity theft

A total of 22 people including municipal employees, have been arrested in connection with 109 cases of corruption, collusion, fraud and tampering with electricity systems.

Of those arrested, two people were City Power employees, two were employees of the City of Joburg and the remainder were contractors and members of the public.

Mayor Parks Tau said in the past year the city council had undertaken focused investigations into underperformance and fraudulent activities relating to the manipulation of property valuations and rates, smart meters, and illegal electricity and water connections.

These actions had resulted in the city council incurring revenue losses amounting to R200 million, however at least R107 million had since been recovered.

“The balance of the losses has already been accounted for in the City’s balance sheet and will not affect residents’ or businesses’ accounts,” Tau said.

The investigation which began last year initially uncovered 48 cases and has since unearthed an additional 61 cases.

“In the next two weeks we expect to make 10 more arrests,” Tau said.

The investigation further revealed that at least 30 other large power users were allegedly involved in defrauding the city council.

MMC for Infrastructure Service and Environment, councillor Matshidiso Mfikoe said these were a combination of shopping malls, businesses and big corporations.

However, she said the names of these users could not currently be announced due to the ongoing investigations.

Meanwhile, she said, residential meter tampering was contributing to electricity theft, but on a significantly smaller scale than that of large power users.

“[Residential meter tampering] does not contribute to inflated billing, once we identify, we go and correct it… and people are charged accordingly,” she said.

Tau dismissed reports that Joburg had experienced planned power cuts or load shedding in recent months.

“The City has been victim of deplorable acts, which have resulted in unplanned outages that have been experienced by some customers,” he said.

“It is clear that we are not dealing with load shedding issues. We are dealing with power outages caused by criminal activities. ”

Tau said on average 32 percent of all outages experienced each month was due to theft and vandalism, 16 percent was the result of damage by third parties and 12 percent was caused by stolen cable and illegal connections.

To address vandalism and criminal activities, the city council was in the process of installing integrated and biometric security systems. These systems will manage and monitor illegal access to power stations and substations.