Hundreds of e-scooter parking tickets are being struck off the system after a magistrate found a flaw in the way the Law Enforcement System Agency was issuing the contraventions.
Sources close to the e-scooter companies contesting around €250,000 in fines told Times of Malta that the majority of justice commissioners were dismissing the cases in which the court’s ruling was being used as a defence.
Earlier this month, Magistrate Victor George Axiak ruled that the citations should have been issued against the company’s representative rather than in his personal capacity. He was ruling in the cases brought against Roberto Pestana de Faria, a director of Seven Group Malta Limited, operators of Bird scooters.
The court ruled in his favour after noting that LESA had issued the fines in his name rather than in the name of the company registered as the lawful owner.
This ruling followed another one handed down in January in which the same magistrate upheld appeals filed by Vladimirs Puzanovs, a company representative of BLT Malta Ltd, which operates its own e-scooters.
In both rulings, the court upheld arguments that the summons should have been issued in the name of the company as the licensed owner listed on the logbook. At least, they argued, it should have been made clear that Puzanovs was simply the company’s representative.
Magistrate Axiak observed that, in terms of Article 2 of the Registration and Licensing of Motor Vehicles Regulations, the owner was defined as “the person, whether as an individual or in representation of a company… in whose name a motor vehicle is registered and licensed”.
The judgment was likely to set another precedent because it can be interpreted as applicable to all motor vehicle categories and could be used by the many thousands of contraveners who paid fines that were incorrectly summoned by the agency- Legal sources
Making further reference to the Interpretation Act, the magistrate concluded that the company representatives should have been cited in their representative capacity rather than in their personal capacity.
The court noted that it was for the prosecution to prove that the company representatives did actually represent the companies involved by producing the relative documentation from the Malta Business Registry.
The fines were for obstruction and non-observance of traffic regulations, including illegal parking, parking the scooters on pavements in a way which blocked access, parking the scooters on corners and on double yellow lines.
Legal sources said that the judgment was likely to set another precedent because it can be interpreted as applicable to all motor vehicle categories and could be used by the many thousands of contraveners who paid fines that were incorrectly summoned by the agency.
Pestana was assisted by lawyers Adrian Sciberras and Jonathan de Maria.