Councils hire debt collector to recoup €2.4m fines

Local councils have hired a private debt collector to recoup an estimated €2.4 million worth of unpaid fines, some of them going back to 2000.

The 43,500 pending fines, which vary from traffic offences to littering and smoking in public, were handed down by local tribunals between 2000 and 2009.

However, for some reason they fell by the wayside, including the traffic infringements, which are meant to show up on the Transport Malta database and should be settled before a vehicle’s annual road licence can be renewed. In many of these cases, the fines were issued for cars that were either scrapped or garaged in the 10-year period and the fine remained unpaid.

Frustrated with the situation, the Local Enforcement System (LES) body, operated by the five joint committees and the Local Councils Association, asked Credit Solutions Ltd to collect the pending fines.

Lawyer Cedric Mifsud, who signed letters sent to the defaulters over the past weeks, warned the fines were not time-barred because they were not ordinary payments but arose from judgments handed down by the local tribunals, which operated like a court of law.

Asked why the pending fines were not showing up on the LES database, Dr Mifsud said this could have happened for a variety of reasons. For instance, restrictions on licence renewals did not come into force as soon as the contravention was issued but showed up on the database once a “guilty” verdict was delivered by the local tribunal or after a Board of Petitions refusal. In some cases, the licence was renewed in the period between the issuing of the ticket and the judgment being handed down by the tribunal or Petitions Board.

But many other fines include smoking indoors, littering, not carrying a dog bag while in public and the carrying of alcohol in prohibited areas, among others.

The clampdown may still not be as smooth running as the authorities are hoping for, however.

A motorist who received a letter to pay a €46 fine for a contravention involving his first car, which he had transferred years after the date quoted, could not understand how such a fine had never appeared before.

“How am I supposed to remember I had received a fine in May 2000 in this particular street and at this particular time? It’s 10 years ago we’re talking about and I have to rely on a system that did not flag it before. Whom should I trust,” the motorist said.

Still, the LES has pointed out it had a database with the summons sent out to people through registered letter. That means that, in theory, there is a document proving that each individual against whom a judgment was delivered knew or should have known about the proceedings.