‘Smart meters were impenetrable, we didn’t believe otherwise’

The ingeniousness of Enemalta installers who had managed to dismantle the allegedly ‘tamper-proof’ smart meters, had stumped suppliers Enel and Enemalta’s top officials to the extent that rumours of the tampering racket in 2012 were considered “not realistically possible”.

Peter Grima, Enemalta’s former chief technical officer, said that Enemalta’s senior officials did not believe smart meters could be physically tampered with, right up to 2013. “We were convinced by the suppliers, as they were, that the meters’ cases could not be opened.”

Grima has denied having given reassurances to an Auditor General’s inquiry into the impenetrability of Enemalta’s smart meters, when reports appeared in the Labour press of smart meters being ‘hacked’ for some €1,200. Grima testified before the Auditor General some time in April-May 2012.

“The media reports were few, and we felt that the rumour was just that: we did not consider tampering a realistic possibility with all the seals the smart meter had, its tamper-proof switch, and the secure programming codes that had to be downloaded from the system for each meter,” Grima said.

But installers at Enemalta had found a way of heating up the meters’ internal processor boxes, to open them up and then reseal them without leaving visible traces.

Grima’s role as CTO was however re-designated to executive head of energy generation in June 2012, and his previous duties on energy distribution were hived off to another executive. He denies that his re-designation was in response to the Auditor General’s report on smart meters, which was published in August 2012.   

“Under executive chairman Louis Giordimaina, the re-organisation balanced out responsibilities between heads, and mirrored the trend in Europe which is to actually divide the energy distribution and generation entities. This separation had nothing to do with the Auditor General’s report,” he says.

The CTO fended off claims by MaltaToday that his reassurances to the Auditor General on the security of smart meters, were made at a time when Enemalta and billing subsidiary ARMS were unable to correctly estimate how much of its generated energy was being accounted for.

“In 2012 it was difficult to reconcile the billings of the year with the energy generated: we knew what energy generated we ‘sent out’, but since billings take place on six-monthly ‘actual reading’ basis, they could only be reconciled later on in the year,” Grima said.

Enemalta officials were then aware of the use of ‘super magnets’ to defy the smart meters. “In 2012 ARMS were experiencing billing problems. There was always an element of doubt as the billing process passed from the old to a new system: we could not spot the discrepancies of 2012 until much later in 2013.”

Grima said that Enemalta’s top officials were only later, in 2013, able to understand the patterns that led investigators to uncover the smart meter racket at play.

“Since only Enemalta personnel were authorised to carry out work on the meters, they were equipped with the right tools to cover their tracks as normal work, and this made it very difficult to detect in the first place,” Grima says.

He denies having been ordered, under political pressure, to ignore rumours of tampering due to the €80 million project. “The anti-tamper protections in place made us believe that the cases could not be opened without them being broken apart.”

But it was also true at the time that only a small percentage of the meters were actually connected to ARMS’s own back-end system, which meant that removing a smart meter would not send out an alarm unless it was communicated to the meter management system.

But Grima said that the meters would still trip and stop electricity from being distributed to the household when the anti-tamper switch was activated. “This would require that the meter be reset through a special programming tool,” he said. But he added that Enemalta installers could easily say they were working on damages or replacing meters, and therefore request that the electricity be reactivated.

The breakthrough for Enemalta came from tip-offs that led to the under-reading meters. It was in 2013 that a pattern was identified, based on who the installers were, and when the meters were being replaced or reinstalled.

“We didn’t believe the meters could be tampered with or that the installers had actually managed to gain access into the meters; because even upon sending them to Enel, the latter were convinced the meters could not be tampered with until they opened them and examined them in their laboratory.

“The fact that this was an ‘inside’ job also played a part as the installers were able to work inside the system to bypass the anti-tamper protection and cover their activities as normal installation or maintenance works. However the presence of a detailed audit trail eventually led to their discovery,” Grima said.