Miriam the miser and deceiver

Minister Miriam Dalli just announced we’ll be getting a refund from ARMS. They’ve been overcharging us on water and electricity bills for years. But don’t get too excited.  The maximum refund you can expect to get is €8.  Yes, €8.

If all 160,000 households get the maximum refund Dalli promised, our Labour government will pay out €1.3 million to consumers who have been overcharged.

But in May 2021 the National Audit Office concluded we’d been overcharged by €6.5 million.  And that was 2021.  Since then, Labour let ARMS brazenly continue to overcharge us. That €6.5 million must have risen quite substantially.

At most, Dalli is only refunding €1.3 million out of €6.5 million ARMS stole from its customers.  That leaves Dalli with a cool €5.2 million in profit.  Those millions belong to the people.  But Dalli’s decided she’ll keep them.

Labour knows it’s cheating the people. In 2018, Joseph Muscat acknowledged “anomalies” existed and promised to fix them by 2019.  Three years later, ARMS still hasn’t changed its extortionate billing methods.

Since 2017, Darren Cordina and Melvin Polidano have been fighting ARMS in court. Like thousands of other customers, ARMS had cheated them, regularly overcharging them.

When they refused to pay, ARMS threatened to cut off their water and power supply.  They were bullied into paying their hiked-up bills. After five gruelling years for Cordina and Polidano, the court confirmed ARMS was cheating.

The court decided ARMS had broken the law and ordered it to refund the plaintiffs.

Four years after Joseph Muscat promised swindled customers fair billing, Dalli announced in January 2022 that a new utility billing system would be introduced.

More than nine months later, Dalli told parliament that the new system would only “start to apply from January 2022”.  “In the coming weeks,” she declared, “we will be announcing details – work is already underway on the new system”.

Already? She’d had almost two years to work on that system. Dalli had done nothing.  She was quite content watching ARMS cheat the nation and rake in more taxpayers’ hard-earned cash.

In July, her government bragged it was “in the process of finalising all aspects of the new legal notice and, once introduced, it would be backdated to January”.

This week Dalli said, “the legal notice will be published on 10 October”.

The legal notice that was almost finalised in July will be published three months later. Keep that in mind. When Labour tells you it’s “in the process of finalising all aspects” of anything, you know it hasn’t even started.

Labour promised the nation a solution to the bills’ “anomalies” would be introduced in 2019. For three long years, the workers’ party continued to steal money from the workers.

The long-promised legal notice will now be published in October, backdated to January.  As for the money stolen since 2014, the most consumers will get back will be Є8. Who do you think you’re fooling, Minister Dalli?

Dalli was repeatedly asked whether she would refund the money stolen by ARMS. Every time she dodged the question and distorted the facts.

“ARMS always issued bills in accordance with the 2009 law,” she said. If ARMS observed the law, why did the court order it to pay back the money?

Dalli has no intention of refunding that money.  The only way to get your money back is to take ARMS to court – or join the Nationalist Party’s class action lawsuit against ARMS. If you want justice, don’t expect Dalli to give it to you.

That €1.3 million out of €6.5 million that ARMS stole from the people is just over half of what Yorgen Fenech was promised in success fees for the Marsa flyover project.

It’s less than one-third of the €4.6 million Yorgen Fenech made out of Enemalta’s rotten Mozura wind farm deal. Miriam’s Labour can be quite extravagant with its friends.  Not so with the workers who voted them in.

Dalli happily squandered more of our money promoting herself.  She spent thousands just in the last week before the election in fake glitzy launches of phantom projects.

On 20 March 2022, in one of her public-funded self-promotion events, she announced a €4 million project to regenerate ‘il-Pont tax-Shell’. Conveniently located in her district, she promised to transform the eyesore into a safe swimming zone.  Her shameless backdrop, funded by you, read ‘Birżebbuġa kif tixraqlek’ (‘Birżebbuġa you deserve’).

Two days later, she hosted another even more extravagant launch, again in Birżebbuġa. The San Lucjan oil storage facilities, she announced, would be transformed into a new open space and a research and investment centre.

Dalli flew in Giovanni di Niederhausern from Pininfarina to glam up the event, giving the impression that €40 million would be invested into the project.  Weeks later, Pininfarina told The Shift it had “no interest” in investing in Dalli’s project.

Pininfarina’s participation was solely a service rendered to the government, which commissioned it to produce a desktop design.  Dalli spent €152,000 on that gimmick.

Meanwhile, Dalli refused to answer basic questions. Where was the €40 million coming from? Which company was carrying out the project? How was Pininfarina chosen? What was the timeline for completion? Would there be a public call for the works? Were plans submitted to the Planning Authority?

Dalli hadn’t even submitted plans to the Planning Authority. Over six months later, there’s no new open space at San Lucjan.

Neither is there any research, far less any investment. Dalli has been elected now, so she can’t be bothered with that Pont tax-Shell or San Lucjan.

Neither is she bothered with the €300,000 pollinator garden for San Gwann she had promised back in May 2021. The promised carob, almond and Judas trees are nowhere to be seen.  Neither are the bees.

Miriam Dalli delivered a triple whammy. She squandered thousands of euros of our money for self-promotion to secure her election. She’s dragged her feet for years, refusing to change the abusive ARMS billing system.  And now she refuses to refund the money ARMS stole from us.

There are only so many times you can fool the nation.