A 76-year-old retired tour operator has been fined €600 and given three months to clean the remaining red arrows and other marks he sprayed at the Majjistral Nature Park for a group of athletes he had brought to Malta on a running tour.

Frenchman Jean-Morel Raymond Ernest Serge was convicted of wilful damage to government property and violations of the Flora, Fauna and Natural Habitats Protection regulations. The Majjistral Park is a designated Special Protection Area of Conservation.

Magistrate Rachel Montebello heard how Serge spray-painted arrows and other red marks on large stones, intended to guide runners competing in an eight-day, 96km course across Malta and Gozo, organised by a French adventure travel company. 

The Malta and Gozo Islands Ultra-Trail activity was organised between August 20 and 29, 2020.

Inspectors found a total of 2,582 red marks

According to evidence produced in court, inspectors from the Environment and Resources Authority and Heritage Malta found a total of 2,582 red marks along several routes of the planned event.

The arrows, delineating tracking routes, were found in Comino, Fomm ir-Riħ, Ras il-Qammieħ, the Red Tower area, Għar Lapsi and Majjistral Nature Park, among others.

However, the court found that the prosecution had not managed to prove that Serge had sprayed all the marks. He was only found responsible for 120 of them.

The court heard how the police found one spray can in his car. Serge accompanied ERA employees along the trail and tried removing most of the marks that he had sprayed along the route. However, some of these either were not removed completely or else reappeared after some time because the method used was not the correct one. He was covering them with soil or just scratching them.

Magistrate Montebello noted that although ERA officials had testified that the removal of all red marks would have cost €144,890, based on an estimate by Heritage Malta, the prosecution had not corroborated this when a Heritage Malta employee was brought to testify in court.

Serge told the court that he was careful to buy water-soluble spray, marked as biodegradable, but this was not the case in the can found in his possession. Moreover, the red marks could not be easily removed and some of them were still visible today, more than three years later, the court noted.

In her judgment, Magistrate Montebello considered that the accused had accepted to remove the marks himself and had cooperated with the ERA officers and the police.

She cleared him of some of the charges brought against him which were related to breaches of environmental protection laws but strictly linked to development.

Apart from fining him €600, the magistrate gave him three months to remove some 50 paint marks that were still visible, against a €50-a-day fine in default.

The prosecution in this case was led by police inspector Elliot Magro.

Separately, Serge was fined €2,000 and lost €5,000 of his bail deposit after he admitted to breaching his bail conditions by not returning to Malta for his case when he was ordered to. He only came back to Malta after the Malta police issued a European arrest warrant against him.