€5,000 confiscated money go missing
‘Cash was counted in the court’s corridors’
The Police Commissioner and the Customs Comptroller have been ordered to pay a man €5,000 after this amount went missing from a larger sum of cash that had been confiscated as part of an investigation.
The court registrar was not to blame for the €5,000 missing from the envelope
In December 2008, Bryan Ellul Sullivan was stopped leaving the island with €50,000 in his possession. He was later charged in court with failing to declare that he had more than €10,000 in cash. The police deposited the tranche that was allegedly undeclared (€40,000) with the courts’ registrar.
Magistrate Antonio Micallef Trigona cleared Mr Ellul Sullivan of the charges in June 2009. However, when Mr Ellul Sullivan went to collect the cash in September of that year, he only found €35,000 deposited with the registrar.
He took the matter to a civil court, which ordered the registrar to pay the cash since it established that he was responsible for court exhibits. These must be returned to their rightful owners in the same state they were in when deposited in court.
The registrar, however, appealed, claiming that there was no evidence that the envelope deposited actually contained €40,000.
It turned out that, before the money was deposited with the court, nobody bothered to re-count it.
The Appeal Court, presided over by Mr Justice Ray Pace, referred to the testimony of the prosecuting inspector in Mr Sullivan’s case, Ivan Cilia, that the cash had been counted in the “court’s corridors” by the Customs Comptrollers, just before Mr Ellul Sullivan’s arraignment
The money was then placed in a white envelope, which was sealed and passed it on to Magistrate Micallef Trigona’s deputy registrar, Sue Fenech, during the court case.
Ms Fenech testified that the envelope had been passed on to the Exhibits Office right after the court case and that the cash had not been counted in open court.
The Appeal Court said the only conclusion it could draw was that the envelope passed on in court did not contain the €40,000 as had been written on the envelope itself.
Mr Justice Pace, therefore, ruled that the registrar was not to blame for the missing €5,000 and ordered the Police Commissioner and the Customs Comptroller to pay Mr Ellul Sullivan the missing cash.