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

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

Madam Justice Jacqueline Padovani Grima, in the First Hall of the Civil Court, passed judgment in the case filed by Patricia Agius against her former insurers, GasanMamo Insurance, over the policy for her Opel Astra Cabrio.

The car was completely 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 such a 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.

Civil Protection Department personnel and police officers were on site to control the flames but the car was damaged beyond economical repair. In her considerations, 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 disclosure rule, the judge said, “must not be indiscriminately used by insurers and judges as an excuse for ignoring insurance claims”.

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.

In view of these considerations, she ruled that the insurance should honour the comprehensive insurance policy covering the car and established the compensation at €24,284.