A French photographer who uploaded pornographic footage of a young Maltese man had filmed five other local models for his pay-per-view porn website last year, Times of Malta has learnt.

Renaud Ribas, who lived in Gżira but has since returned to France, was last month handed a two-year suspended sentence for putting on the internet a recording of a young Maltese man engaged in a sexual act.

Nobody told me it was illegal to do porn here

The video went viral after it was posted on social media by a foreign member of Mr Ribas’s pornographic website.

It turns out that this video was not the only erotic footage Mr Ribas shot here.

He told Times of Malta he had made at least five other films of Maltese men engaged in some form of sexual act last year.

Apart from this, he had also met nearly two dozen aspiring Maltese models who posed nude during the past 11 months.

The images were not taken surreptitiously and Mr Ribas insisted the models signed a contract stipulating that the images would appear on a website.

“I did a lot of photo shoots in Malta, but nobody told me it was illegal to do porn here.

“I record all my shoots with a flip camera and it wasn’t hidden,” he said.

The contract, seen by this newspaper, makes no reference to pornography, but states the model must be “completely willing and is in no way forced to perform the services requested by the photographer”.

It adds: “The parties have agreed to have photographs, videos to be broadcast by the photographer and published on the websites of the association.”

Models were paid between €30 and €150 for an hour-long photo session. He would pay more for models who would take part in a porn shoot.

I stopped when I had trouble with Maltese law

The photographer insisted he had informed all the models before the shoot that the images would be of an erotic nature and posted online.

The website, which he ran from his Gżira home, was not accessible to Maltese viewers, but Mr Ribas said as many as 15 people would pay €2 for a couple of viewings every month. The website had been active since 2005.

Mr Ribas said he had an international collection of shoots with around 300 models from across Europe.

“I was uploading one shoot every week. This video was the first Maltese one I uploaded and then I stopped when I had trouble with Maltese law.”

In Malta, distributing, circulating or publishing pornographic material is prohibited by Article 208 of the Criminal Code. Pornography is defined as material whose dominant characteristics are the exploitation of or undue emphasis on sex.

But Mr Ribas described the law as hypocritical.

“In Malta there are a lot of prostitutes, massage parlours... and when you go to Paceville, girls are dressed like prostitutes. With all this, how is it possible to imagine a law against porn?” he said.

The photographer said he had come into contact with the models through word of mouth recommendations as well as on social media.

Questions sent to police on this case were not answered.