Two bogus private investigators, one a former police officer, have been ordered to refund a man more than €230,000 which they extracted from him through blackmail in a carefully engineered scam 15 years ago.

The victim, John Attard, had engaged a former policewoman, Grace Gatt, and Lourdes Castillo as private investigators in 2004, although they had no licence.

Gatt and Castillo then concocted a scam to extort large sums of money from their victim.

The women made up a story about some “provocative” messages that Attard had exchanged with an underage girl, the First Hall of the Civil Court heard.

They told Attard that the girl’s mother was demanding large sums of money to buy her silence. Attard fell for the trick and coughed up the cash – which was pocketed by the fraudulent duo.

The two women also told their victim that his job with the government was on the line due to these messages and that they needed to pay his superiors for the matter to be kept under wraps.

They also threatened to report him to the police if he did not pay up.

Attard paid the amounts they demanded. But then, when the two women kept making more demands, he became suspicious and filed a police report.

The report, in turn, prompted the police to start investigating the officer. Eventually, the two women were arraigned, found guilty of the scam and sentenced to two years in prison suspended for four years.

The sentence was later confirmed on appeal.

Attard testified that he had seen an advert in a local newspaper in 2004 saying the two were offering private investigation services. He approached them to investigate a woman whom he was interested in.

Gatt and Castillo assured him they were private investigators, he told the court, which, however, heard evidence that they had no licence to work as such.

Initially he was paying them for their services but, then, they made up a story about inappropriate messages exchanged with an underage girl.

Attard paid them just over €64,000 which, Gatt and Castillo told him, they had passed on to the girl’s mother.

He also paid them nearly €140,000 to bribe someone at the office after they tricked Attard into believing that his superiors knew about the story and wanted to fire him.

Mr Justice Francesco Depasquale, presiding over the First Hall of the Civil Court, said that although two opposing versions of the same story had been told, the victim’s was more credible and was corroborated by circumstantial evidence. Moreover, the Criminal Court had found the women guilty of committing the scam and of defrauding the victim.

He noted that they had created the scam together so they both had to refund the money to the victim. He, therefore, ordered them to pay Attard €230,235.

Gatt was dismissed from the police force in 2006 but last year she won a case she had filed before the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) over the way it happened.

The ECHR found that a board appointed by the police commissioner to consider disciplinary proceedings against Gatt was not independent and impartial and that she was denied the right to a fair hearing when she was dismissed in 2006.

Gatt was awarded €25,000 in moral damages and costs.