A judge has ordered an insurance firm to pay a woman €24,300 as compensation for a Opel Astra Cabrio that was destroyed when it was targeted by arsonists outside her house almost a decade ago.

The insurance firm, GasanMamo Insurance, refused to pay because one of the conditions of the insurance policy was that the car would be garaged at night, but the policyholder, Patricia Agius, managed to prove that the vehicle was parked outside because of a medical emergency involving her young son.

The car was destroyed in a fire on the night of December 13, 2005. The owner filed a claim under her comprehensive insurance policy but GasanMamo refused to honour it, basing its decision on one of the conditions governing the policy that the car must be garaged when it was not being used at night.

The court was told that insurance companies usually inserted the garage condition in policies covering soft-top vehicles.

Ms Agius informed the court that the previous evening she had taken her two-year-old son to the health centre because he had suffered a bout of croup and required a nebuliser. When she got back home, she parked the car two doors down from her residence just in case she needed to rush him to the health centre again at night. Then, at 3am, she was woken up by banging on her door, with neighbours telling her that her car was engulfed in flames.

Madam Justice Padovani Grima said that although through the rule of disclosure Ms Agius should have informed her insurers of her son’s life-threatening medical condition, the court did not see this information as being something that should nullify an insurance contract. 

The judge ruled there was no evidence of negligence or malice on the part of Ms Agius and her decision to leave the car parked outside and the fire itself could not be classified as insurance fraud.

Moreover, the judge noted that garaging a car would not have stopped an arsonist who would have already targeted it.