An appeal has been filed against a court decision which found that a man was not guilty of electoral corrupt practices involving his employees at the last general election.

The case had been filed following a report tot he police by Labour MP Anglu Farrugia, against Pierre Bartolo.

He was accused of having threatened his employees Kristylee Bezzina and Anthony Zammit, in order to vote for the PN during the general election on March 8, 2008.

The Office of the Attorney General in its appeal said that the first court had made a mistaken or incomplete appreciation of the evidence and had not allowed the prosecution to cross-examine Kristylee Bezzina on the basis of a statement she had previously made.

It had resulted that Bezzina first said she would not vote. Then her employer phoned her mother to check that she had not lost her voting document, as she had claimed. When he was told that the document had been found, he drove Ms Bezzina to the polling station during office hours so that she could vote. He also told her that if the Labour won the election, she would lose her job.

It was also observed that the first court had declared that the fact that somebody encouraged somebody else to vote and provided transport for this purpose did not constitute a corrupt practice, and this was actually something which even the electoral office and the political parties did.

This, the Attorney General said, did not hold water since Mr Bartolo had gone beyond simply encouraging another person to vote. The electoral office and the parties provided transport to those people who would have already have decided to vote. In this case, Ms Bezzina had decided she did not want to vote and had not requested transport.

Dr Leonard Caruana signed the appeal