Tamarkin

On Tuesday January 31, 2005 Tom Tamarkin personally hand delivered a letter dated January 25, 2005 to Mr. Robert Foster, President, Southern California Edison at Mr. Foster’s Rosemead, California office along with a Power Point presentation titled “SCE AMI Team Roadmap” dated January 28, 2005. Click here to download the Roadmap Power Point. Page 2, paragraph 3, of the Robert Foster letter provided background on the world’s largest Advanced Meter Infrastructure system being deployed by Enel Electric in Italy. Enel’s AMI system covered 28 million electrical kilowatt-hour meters. At that time the meters were being manufactured by Kaifa in ShenZhen, China and the software and system integration was being handled by IBM.

After Mr. Foster’s receipt of the Tamarkin/USCL letter, IBM was contacted and IBM agreed to host and sponsor a tour in Italy for Mr. Foster of the ongoing AMI deployment.

Shortly thereafter, USCL began a series of presentations at various SCE offices in Southern California teaching SCE’s engineers and staff the positive benefits of AMI.

USCL became one of the founding members of an industry consortium consisting of utility companies worldwide and meter/AMI solutions companies as organized by SCE. The group was call OpenAMI™.

During this time Tom Tamarkin developed a working relationship with the Kaifa U.S. utility sector engineers and managers responsible for business development in the U.S. Tamarkin was also working closely with SCE and was approved as a bidder in the SCE AMI RFP having previously stimulated the SCE RFI.

Kaifa Lobby meeting

In February 2006 Tamarkin was hosted by Kaifa at their ShenZhen, China facility and discussions were held regarding Kaifa’s manufacturing on an exclusive basis of an ANSI class 200 smart meter conforming to the DM-06 Meter Specification USCL prepared for SCE. A draft contract prepared by USCL’s lawyers was reviewed.

Tom & Emily Tamarkin returned to ShenZhen, China in March 2006 to meet with the President of Kaifa to discuss the 9 March 2006 memo outlining USCL Contract Concerns, and layout the final terms of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the companies. Click here for the 14 -15 March 2006 meeting Agenda.

After being approached by Wasion Meter Group and Mr. We Ji, a team from USCL met in Changsha, China and Wasion Hunan Werko agreed to invest in USCL and take a 40% minority position. Once the advanced payment of $500,000 USD against the agreed to $4 million USD investment in USCL was received by USCL at their U.S. Bank, Tom Tamarkin/USCL sent Kaifa a letter dated June 9, 2006 notifying Kaifa of Wasion’s investment decision and suggestion that USCL would therefore not be able to continuing working with Kaifa.

For the record, Wasion reneged on its investment agreement with USCL after making the first advance. Wasion was unable to provide working ANSI meters conforming to the DM-06 Meter spec for delivery to SCE as part of the RFP evaluation and USCL was subsequently disqualified by SCE as an approved bidder due to failure to deliver prototype meters.