A former company director who swindled a couple out of €25,000 and pocketed funds meant for advertising space on TVM has been jailed for 33 months.

Donald Micallef, 35, faced criminal charges in two separate cases revolving around fraud, misappropriation and forgery.

Mr Micallef, whose business Market Handle Ltd has since gone to ruins, took money from YAL Home and Electronics but never passed it on to PBS to pay for advertising on TVM and instead using the money to pay for installments on a car purchase. 

In the second case, Mr Micallef had persuaded a couple to lend him some €25,000 to secure a bank loan, assuring the husband and wife that he would have the loan secured within three weeks. He had even agreed to repay their good deed with an extra Lm2,500.

That never happened, the court found, with Mr Micallef using the money for his own personal ends. 

The court, presided over by magistrate Joseph Mifsud, observed that while all evidence pointed towards Mr Micallef as the ‘mastermind’ behind the swindle, the same could not be said for Celine Lee Bentley, a company official charged alongside the man.

As admitted by the director himself when testifying under oath, he was “the person in charge to find suppliers, find clients and make sure that everything was running smoothly”, whereas the co-accused had never been involved in any transactions.

In fact, the court concluded that the prosecution had failed to prove that Ms Bentley had been “in any way aware of the facts” leading to the criminal proceedings.

For this reason, the court cleared the woman of all accusations while declaring her co-accused guilty and condemning him to two separate jail terms of 2 years and 9 months.

The court further ordered him to refund the swindled couple their €25,000 within six months.