LAHORE: The Lahore Electric Supply Company (Lesco) management has suspended a sub-divisional officer (SDO) from service for being involved in power theft and sacked an assistant lineman for negligence.

According to the Lesco CEO Shahid Haidar, the Karim Park SDO was suspended from the post after he was found involved in stealing electricity by tampering with the meter installed at his residence.

`When a team checked, it found the meter installed at his residence was tampered with (reversed reading etc),` the CEO told Dawn on Sunday.

`A number of SDOs, executive engineers, line superintendents, linemen, meter readers and other employees have recently been either suspended or removed from service on account of various allegations, including the power thef t,` he maintained.

To a question, the CEO said the Rs14 per unit relief given by the Punjab government had been incorporated in the bills of all those falling within the bracket of 300 to 500 units.

`All bills have been distributed to consumers with a sufficient time of 10 days to deposit the bills. However, those fall-ing in first batch with their bills distributed without relief soon after Aug 21 would be reimbursed the relief amount if they had paid the bill already.

Meanwhile, the Lesco admin on Sunday also suspended a lineman of Kalakhatai subdivision from service for being negligent of duty.

On the other hand, the Lesco teams, in the ongoing operation, detected on Sunday another 455 connections from where the customers were pilfering electricity in all its circles of five districts (Lahore, Sheikhupura, Nankana Sahib, Kasur and Okara).

The Lesco spokesman told the media that the company had also submitted FIR applications against electricity thieves, out of which 142 FIRs had been registered with respective police stations while 18 accused had been arrested.

The spokesman added that a large number of commercial consumers were also found involved in electricity theft and all of them had their power supply disconnected and they were charged with detection units. All such connections were disconnected and charged with a total of 522,376 units as detection bill amounting to Rs13.6m. The Lesco teams also recovered more than Rs 3m from 184 chronic defaulters.