Nosy Tarsee has a riddle. How did a five-star hotel-casino sitting comfortably in a Visayas business district get away with nearly P130 million in claimed differential billings for years of under-registered electricity consumption?

The only explanation is the political family-owner’s influence.

It began with a routine check that registered zero readings in key phases of the billing meter.

The electric utility requested a scheduled interruption of the hotel’s own 69-kV substation so inspectors could examine the facilities up close. Remarkably, the hotel allowed the inspection.

Nosy Tarsee’s deep sources who are familiar with the episode suggested management felt secure, convinced the “jumpers,” or rather the carefully cut wires, had been cleverly concealed.

From the transformers to the meter, inspectors found two #10 AWG wires that carried current had been deliberately severed, their cut edges neatly wrapped in electrical tape.

By cutting them, they interrupted or reduced the signal to the meter, so the meter registered far less electricity than the hotel was actually consuming. That is the classic form of meter tampering that led to the differential billing claim.

The tampering had reduced the power registration dramatically — utility estimates put the under-recording at 66 percent.

The inspection team replaced and sealed the wires on the spot. When the team returned days later, the wires had been cut again and re-taped, still inside the hotel’s fenced and padlocked substation compound, a space under its direct control.

Criminal charges under the anti-pilferage law were filed against the hotel and several of its officers. Those charges later evaporated for alleged lack of probable cause. The regulatory side proved more enduring: the hotel was found liable for the illegal use of electricity due to the altered metering facility.

Yet the final recovery ordered was slashed to roughly P39 million, barely a quarter of the original claim, limited largely to one year’s worth of unregistered power and tempered by findings that the utility itself had been slow to detect the anomaly. The reduced amount was paid, and the matter faded from public view.

The owners’ background adds another layer of intrigue. The family behind the property built its early fortune in the plastics industry before discovering that politics was a more accommodating arena.

One cannot help but note how smoothly a case involving such brazen physical interference with metering equipment, wires cut, taped, discovered, repaired, then cut again, was resolved to a fraction of the demanded sum.

The least the political family can do is return the roughly P130 million, like a well-known plunderer who was acquitted sometime ago.

In that separate case, the Sandiganbayan ordered the accused (solidarily and jointly) to return P124.5 million to the national treasury as civil damages arising from the plunder charge, an amount that, of late, has remained unpaid.