Suspended jail term for civil servant in children's allowance sham

A Social Services Department clerk was given a two-year jail term suspended for four years for defrauding the government of over Lm20,000 when she created fictitious families and directed children's allowance funds to her bank accounts.

Maria Victoria Attard, 34, of Cospicua was also fined Lm2,400 and generally indicted after she admitted to changing data and using her colleague's password to steal over Lm20,000 from children's allowance funds on and before May 2005.

Magistrate Saviour Demicoli, presiding over the case, had heard Police Inspector Ian Abdilla explain how the case started when a direct children's allowance payment was made to a closed HSBC Bank account and the bank returned the payment to the department.

The department issued a cheque to the "Hili" family by post but the cheque was returned to the department which then realised that the Hili family was not on its records.

The police were informed and investigations uncovered 19 suspicious families. Some were existing families who did not qualify for children's allowance, some had an additional fictitious child and others were completely fictitious.

It turned out that 76 payments had been made since 2002, amounting to Lm20,606. Twenty five of the payments were made to a Bank of Valletta account, another 22 to another account at the same bank and 24 payments were made to an HSBC account. All the accounts belonged to Ms Attard.

The remaining five cheques had been posted to Ms Attard's house or that of her relatives.

Then, the 20th family was created and investigations revealed that this family - the Wellington family with four children - was also fictitious and the payment details entered were those of an HSBC account belonging to Ms Attard.

When taken in for questioning, Ms Attard explained that she created the families and took the money. She said she had accessed her colleague's computer when she left her desk for some time.

Ms Attard also confessed that she had spent all the money on house improvements and had also bought crystal items and diamond jewellery.

Lawyer Joseph Giglio was defence counsel.