Nosy Tarsee has been sitting on this one for a while, waiting for the right moment to dish it out.

Picture this: a well-known hospitality-and-casino address on the reclamation strip in the Visayas, the kind of property where wedding receptions and corporate galas happen under the same chandeliers. Over the years, the clan behind it has had more than one member step into public office.

Anyway, back to the tea. An electric cooperative’s inspection team once found itself inside this hotel’s 69-kV substation, and what they claimed to have found — cut electric wires, conduits wrapped suspiciously in tape — was enough to accuse the property of quietly shaving down its meter readings for years.

The co-op’s lawyers came out swinging with a bill north of P168 million, dating the alleged shortfall back to 2007.

But here’s the twist: The city prosecutor took one look and tossed the criminal complaint — no probable cause being the reason — and pointedly noted that the hotel management had let the inspectors roam the substation unsupervised, which isn’t exactly how a guilty operator would behave.

The regulator, though, wasn’t quite as forgiving. The ERC found enough of an anomaly to warrant a payout. Still, it scaled the utility’s figures back, capping the recoverable back bill at just one year and scolding the co-op for sleeping on its inspection duties for far too long.

The final tab of P38.9 million was settled and closed by September 2013, and the case never got anywhere near a courtroom again.

Moral of the story: Sometimes the “scandal” everyone whispers about at Nosy Tarsee’s mahjong table turns out to be a regulator scolding both sides — the hotel for the metering anomaly nobody could quite explain, and the utility for napping on the job and then crying foul.