Dues-to-prison equation explained

Finance Minister Tonio Fenech explained what many people have often wondered about: how the courts equate unpaid dues with imprisonment.

Answering a parliamentary question by Labour MP Marie Louise Coleiro Preca, he said each prisoner at the Corradino Correctional Facility cost the state around €50 a day. The Criminal Code gave the courts the discretion to order that an inflicted fine could be paid in rates over no longer than three years. But if one payment was missed, the total amount still due would have to be settled in one immediate payment. If even this single payment was not made, the balance would be transformed into a term of imprisonment.

Dr Coleiro Preca had asked if it suited the government better to accept that people owing money to the VAT Department, and ordered by the courts to pay their dues together with extraordinary fines, were given the opportunity to pay by instalments, rather than having them put in prison. What would such a system cost the government?

She also asked if the government was considering the fact that imprisoning such debtors meant that they were unable to earn money to settle their public debts and that the government would, therefore, have to issue social benefits to their families. How much were such social benefits costing the taxpayer?

Minister Fenech replied that the Department of Social Services did not have the information to calculate how much such social benefits cost.

He also explained that before a case was brought to court, the VAT Department would have been chasing the debtor for years and would have been ignored by the debtor.

Once judgment was handed down, there would be no possibility for the department to come to any alternative arrangement with the debtor.