A young driver who innocently combined his surname and year of birth into a personalised number plate has been asked to change it because Transport Malta finds it vulgar.

The news came as a big surprise to Nicholas Rizzo, who has been sporting the number plate on the road for more than a year.

Like many other car owners, Mr Rizzo paid extra to add a personal touch to his standard six-character number plate when he bought his new car. He merged his surname with his year of birth, 1988. The result was RZZ-088.

The plate had been approved and issued by Transport Malta, which saw nothing indecent in the combination at the time. But last month, Mr Rizzo received a letter from Transport Malta telling him it must be changed.

He was asked to report to the licensing department within a week.

“The letter didn’t say why the plate must be removed, so I thought it must have been used in a robbery or something serious,” Mr Rizzo said.

“I spent the whole day calling Transport Malta to see what happened but it was a disaster... The people at customer care had never heard of such a case and I kept being transferred from one department to another.”

Eventually, he contacted a more helpful person at the Transport Ministry and was told the number plate had to be changed because it was “offensive”.

Incredulous, Mr Rizzo asked for an explanation. Uncomfortable with being too explicit, the official simply told him to focus on thelast four characters.

“When it hit me, I couldn’t believe they were serious,” Mr Rizzo said, explaining it suddenly dawned on him how, with some imagination, the number plate could be read as a vulgar Maltese word. “The first two letters make it worse,” he pointed out.

He explained to Transport Malta why he chose the combination of characters but to no avail.

He managed to negotiate an extension of his deadline as he is studying for his exams and cannot afford to join the queues at Transport Malta.

When contacted, a Transport Malta spokesman said that the case was not prompted by a report from the public: “We took the initiative ourselves.”

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