MUNICIPAL OFFICIAL GRANTED BAIL FOR THEFT OF FREE ELECTRICITY AND POCKETING MORE THAN A MILLION RANDS FROM THE FRAUD
The Piketberg Magistrates` Court granted a municipal employee, Pieter Jacobus Adams, R500 bail and transferred his case to the Bellville Specialised Commercial Crime Court, for his first appearance on 24 March 2023.
Adams is charged with 473 counts of fraud after he fraudulently allocated free electricity to households and businesses and pocketed more than R1,3 million paid by the recipients of that electricity.
He was employed as a Chief Clerk: Credit Control in the Bergrivier Municipality from 1 July 2002, until his resignation on 25 November 2019. His responsibilities included ensuring that electricity is provided to the correct consumers, adding new pre-paid meters to the pre-paid system, and submitting any suspected tampering of metering units to the water/electricity department for further investigation. The state alleges that the accused issued unauthorised transactions (free electricity tokens) to individuals every month from 2016 to 2019, for which no payment was received by the municipality. The electricity issued was to the value of R1,3 million.
The state further alleges that Adams issued “free”/replacement tokens to meters which were not replaced, and no documentation could be found for any of the above-mentioned meter numbers.
His luck on his fraudulent scheme ran out on 19 September 2019, when the municipality discovered that the prepaid electricity meter in the accused’s residence was replaced and changed to an indigent tariff, and the token to affect the said change was issued by the suspect himself. He did not report this to his supervisor.
The municipality decided to investigate and discovered that during the period, from March 2016 until September 2019, the suspect issued free electricity tokens on prepaid meters that were not replaced by prepaid meter customers. It was also detected that free electricity tokens were issued monthly in respect of the same prepaid meters and that free electricity tokens were issued outside normal office hours and within normal office hours.
The investigation further revealed that several pre-paid meters had significant amounts of electricity units loaded on them although the customers had not bought electricity from the municipality for a long time and therefore ought to have had few units if any at all. No supporting documents could be found for the issuing of free electricity tokens generated by the suspect.
The investigation confirmed that Adams issued more than 700 000 units of free electricity tokens, between March 2016 and September 2019, to pre-paid meters for customers to the value of R1,3 million, which he had no authority to do. He received the cash from the customers, kept it for himself and then loaded the free electricity tokens on the system for the customers which he was not entitled to do.
He appeared at the Piketberg Magistrates Court, following a warrant of arrest issued for him to appear. He was released on bail and was ordered to appear at the Bellville Specialised Commercial Crimes Court, where he will apply for legal aid to represent him.
