Those who profit from selling electrical energy for more than they paid for it, operating under licences bought from the state, have started to issue threats against customers from whom they haven’t taken meter readings for quite a while. In this particular case, communicated to us by a correspondent in Scotland, the company sent a letter containing the words “PLEASE ACT NOW” printed in large black capital letters on a yellow background.
Underneath those words was a strap line saying “We haven’t had electricity meter readings for over a year”. Then further down, there was an indented paragraph with an exclamation mark to the left of it, printed on a green circle. This said “If you refuse or ignore our request, and we later find you have used more energy than we have estimated, we reserve the right to ask you to pay the full cost of the energy used.”
The letter concluded “If we don’t hear from you in 14 calendar days, we’ll try to get in touch again.” It was signed “The Read Validation Team”.
“Refuse or ignore our request”…”validation team” … “if we don’t hear from you” … “reserve the right”. Who do these pieces of shit think they are?
If they want a meter reading, let them come and take one!
Clearly these moneygrabbers are cutting their costs by reducing the amount of meter reading they do, choosing instead to try to coerce their customers into reading their own meters for free. It’s the same story with self-checkouts, much recycling, and so on.
We say “their own” meters, but of course electricity meters aren’t actually owned by the customers. We aren’t sure who they are owned by – they may well be owned by OVO (see below) – but whoever owns them, it’s not the customers.
If you receive a letter like this, treat it with the contempt it deserves. It’s the company’s responsibility to read the meter. The purpose of the meter is to measure how much electrical energy they’ve sold you, so they can bill you for it. If they’re too greedy to put their hands in their pockets and pay somebody to come to read the meter, fuck them. Please consider writing back telling them to fuck off and saying they can either read their own meter at their own expense or else they can pay you a specified sum for the inconvenience and costs involved in you reading it yourself and then telling them what numbers are shown on it. Tell them if they don’t like it they can fucking well cut you off.
Scum like this don’t like it up them.
Researchers have told us that “SSE” and “Scottish Hydro” are trading names used by OVO Electricity Limited, part of the OVO Group. Who actually controls this company is as shadowy a matter as you might expect. The Mitsubishi keiretsu (a zaibatsu under another name) may play a role. The CEO of OVO’s “retail energy business” seems to be a man called Adrian Letts, who used to be the head of global online operations for Tesco, the supermarket company that operates using entities registered in the Cayman Islands. Before that, Letts was a director of Talk Talk, a company well known to engage in various types of filthy activity. [1] We understand that the OVO Group is a “subsidiary” of Imagination Industries Limited, a vehicle said to be wholly owned by a man named Stephen Fitzpatrick.
NOTES
- A former CEO of TalkTalk is Dido Harding, a friend of Old Etonian Tories Boris Johnson and David Cameron and the head of the “National Health Service’s” SARS-CoV2 “Test and Trace” scam, during which billions of pounds, perhaps tens of billions, went “whooosh”, for which nobody either inside or outside the government has so far been jailed or even prosecuted. She is also one of many members of the House of Lords who are involved in the squeaky clean world of horse-racing.