Republic Act No. 7832 (Update)

I received this letter, below, from the Cepalco official who has filed a criminal action against me and my wife for voilation of Republic Act No. 7832, The Anti-electricity and Electric Transmission Lines/Materials Pilferage Act of 1994. Click the image to see a larger more easy-to-read version of it.

Engineer Benjamin R. Gamat, Jr., is complaining that I posted about this criminal lawsuit on my blog, defending himself with the classical Nuremberg Defense, claiming he was only “following orders”, just doing his job when he filed this action against me.

He states “correct me if I am wrong, but you are bringing the matter in the wrong forum wherein mere opinions from the net cannot address your problem.” The point of publishing this on my blog, Engineer Gamat, is to perform my civic duty and warn others that they are just as vulnerable to these baseless accusations as I am. I am not seeking resolution of this matter via my blog. This case should be and shall be decided in a court of law.

The way the law is written is that anyone who rents a house that has a tampered meter could be charged under this act and fined for one year’s “back-charges”, even if they have only just moved into the house. I would recommend that anyone who rents a house in The Philippines order an inspection of their electric meter immediately upon leasing the house, or perhaps even prior to signing the lease. Insist upon an inspection of the electric meter.

Now Annex-A, which was attached to the criminal complaint against me and my wife, as you can see in the below image, claims that billed monthly consumption for the past year was 3960 KW, and that the corrected monthly consumption should be 47,520 KW per month. The rate per KW is 6.390 per KW.

The amount billed for the previous year was PHP 76.917.60 (which is actually an incorrect figure. I don’t know how that figure was calculated, but I cannot get the same figure and I do have all the electrical records going back since the house was built). So, Cepalco is claiming that the meter was registering only 1/12 of the actual electrical usage. As you can see on Annex-A, the claimed method “Basis of Corrected Monthly Consumption : Actual Load”. Now this is total bullshit. If you took every electrial appliance, light bulb, TV, and anything else that used electricity, and turned them all on, maxed them out, there is no way we would ever use 47,520 KW in a month.

That Engineer Gamat has filed a criminal complaint against me based on this purjorous claim is the basis of my claiming that they are trying to rip me off. 47,520 KW per month is simply ludicrous. They also claim the “basis of period to be recovered : Minimum 1 year”, and I had only lived in the house 8 months at the time the alleged tampered meter was discovered. If the meter was actually tampered with, which I doubt. An electrical meter that is off by 20% is probably within 1 standard deviation of the norm here.

Now it is true that our average electrical bill has gone up by almost PHP 2000 per month since the new digital meter has been installed, about 20%. This leads me to believe that “Corrected Monthly Conusumption number of 47,520 KW is off by a factor of 10, and should actually be 4752 KW per month. If you divide 4752 by 3960, the result is precisely 1.2, a 20% increase. So this outrageousness may simply be that of one decimal place.

While I am not a citizen of The Philippines, I am certainly law-abiding, and as such I will take a stand against injustice and I will scream about it on my own blog if I want to.

In Benjamin R.Gamat, Jr.’s letter to me his last line is “We expect your response to this letter”. Who is “We” Mr. Gamat? You cc’d no one at Cepalco with this letter. You simply used Cepalco letterhead to write your complaint to me. This is a case you will NOT win in a court of law because your claims are false and perjurous.

In my humble opinion, you are neither honest nor sincere.

In the event that Cepalco realizes they have made an error in bringing these criminal charges against me and that their figures are in error, and Benjamin R. Gamat, Jr., is the one that brings Cepalco to thier senses, then I will revise my blog and praise the company for their willingness to right a wrong. But if this case continues, I will continue to blog about it. I will hire my own electrical engineers to do a study of this house and determine not only what my actual avergage conusumption is , but what the maximum consumpution is. I will go into court armed with experts and I will sue Cepalco for false charges against me after I win the case.

As a final note, I do not wish to make myself an enemy of Cepalco. I am not a rich man and I am certain they can throw a lot more money at this case than I can. However, there comes a time when a man must make a stand for right against wrong, and in this case I must take a stand, come what may. I will not go quietly. I will not be victimized by a large corporation. I will fight when I have to, and while this is not a fight I would choose, it has been put upon my plate, and I will not back down.

I have done nothing wrong and will not allow my good name to be impugned by this outrageousness.

Mr. Benjamin R. Gamat, Jr., please consider this as your formal response. And after reading it, why not show it to your supervisor?

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 13th, 2008 at 14:07 and is filed under Cagayan de Oro, Crimes & Scams, Philippines Expat Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.