A family court has annulled a woman’s marriage to a foreigner whom she had never seen before and whom she wed under the influence of drugs.

The couple got married in a civil ceremony at the Marriage Registry nearly two decades ago, in November 2002, at a time when the woman was passing through a bad patch in her life dealing with a severe drug addiction, the court heard.

The marriage had been proposed and organised by her friend and the first time she met her husband-to-be was at the registry in Valletta.

On that day, she was heavily under the influence of drugs.

After the ceremony, the two went their separate ways, the woman told Madam Justice Jacqueline Padovani Grima.

They only met again a few days later when he asked her to accompany him to the Immigration Office to apply for citizenship. They attended three times in all.

But since they barely knew each other, their replies to the immigration officers rarely matched so the man was not granted citizenship.

The woman testified that soon after the wedding she embarked on a series of drug rehabilitation programmes until finally, in 2010, she managed to complete a programme and kicked her drug habit.

She never saw the man again after they met at the Immigration Office. They never lived together and never consummated their marriage, she testified.

She was now in a stable relationship and had a son with her new partner. She was seeking an annulment so they could get married. 

Various witnesses, including police officers and officials from Identity Malta, testified they had found no details of the man in the National Identity Management System.

All they found was a note that the two had got married civilly in 2002.

The immigration police said that because the man had arrived in Malta from a Schengen country, they had no details of his movements. The last hit on the traveller’s history database was in November 2011 when he left Malta for Egypt.

Representatives from various banks testified to the absence of any bank accounts in the man’s name, while a Transport Malta representative told the court the name was linked to a car which had since been scrapped.

The judge observed that the circumstances in which the marriage took place were “rather peculiar”. The woman’s vulnerability, she noted, had been exploited for the man to try and acquire Maltese citizenship.

The woman had started a new life, having managed to kick her drug habit and enter a stable relationship with a man with whom she had a child.

The judge said she was morally convinced the marriage had been staged as one of convenience and upheld the woman’s request for an annulment.