Five police officials cleared in car mileage tampering case

Five police officials accused of offences linked to an investigation into tampered mileage gauges on imported cars have been acquitted.

The alleged scheme first came to light in 2022, when a probe flagged two car dealerships suspected of having tampered with the mileage counts of cars imported from Japan.

According to the allegations, the dealerships were registering the second-hand cars with lower mileage counts than they had actually accumulated over the years.

Several police officers were later temporarily suspended from the force after an investigation by the Financial Crimes Investigation Department flagged several shortcomings in their handling of the process.

The four suspended officials, Christopher Long, Raymond Bonnici, David Debattista and Martin John Mifsud, were later charged with falsifying documents and making false declarations linked to the scheme. A fifth man, George Farrugia, a former reserve police officer, was also charged.

However, all five were cleared by the courts this week, with Magistrate Kevan Azzopardi finding that there was insufficient evidence to show that the men had knowingly made false declarations when signing off on the vehicles’ certification.

A convoluted process

Testimony throughout the case revealed the convoluted and highly bureaucratic process through which imported cars were registered, involving stamped approvals from multiple authorities, including the police, customs and Transport Malta.

Witnesses told the court that car importers would typically first approach the police’s Stolen Vehicle Squad to have them stamp a form declaring that the vehicle was not stolen, to kick-start the registration process.

The form would then go to Transport Malta for a second stamp, before the vehicle was eventually brought to Malta.

Once it eventually arrived in Malta, the vehicle would then be inspected by police, who were responsible for ensuring that its chassis number matched that on the importer’s documents, before listing its mileage on the form.

The process would then move again to Transport Malta for another stamp of approval, before returning to the police for a final inspection and stamp, concluding the process.

Inspections dated before the vehicle arrived in Malta

However, the court found that this meant that the initial police stamp was being issued before the car had even arrived in Malta, despite the stamp itself certifying that the vehicle had been “inspected” by the police.

Meanwhile, the police’s final stamp marking the release of the vehicle was often dated earlier than the Transport Malta stamp recording its arrival in Malta, suggesting that the vehicle had been inspected before it was even on the island.

Police officials testified that they had tested a random sample of car imports, finding similar irregularities in most cases.

Administrative flaws, but no criminal intent

In their testimony, two of the defendants, Raymond Bonnici and Christopher Long, argued that the initial stamp issued by police was required for Transport Malta to proceed with the application and bring the vehicle to Malta in the first place.

Transport Malta officials gave similar accounts, telling the court that the dates listed on importation forms did not necessarily reflect the real date of the vehicle’s arrival in Malta. The authority was primarily concerned with whether the form had been properly stamped, rather than with the chronology of the approvals, officials testified.

Ultimately, the court accepted the defendants’ arguments that the process by which stamps were issued was the result of “a procedural agreement adopted by the entities concerned”.

Although this process resulted in serious procedural and administrative defects, the court said the defendants did “not have any knowledge of the consequences, nor did they have any criminal intent when issuing the initial stamps and signatures”.

All five men were cleared of the charges. Lawyers Arthur Azzopardi and David Saliba were counsel for the defence.