A man who was found guilty of purchasing five compressors that had reportedly been stolen has been cleared of all liability on appeal.

Orazio Spiteri had bought the five compressors in October 2010 from a total stranger who had entered his workshop and offered him the deal.

Months later he was taken to court, accused and convicted of handling stolen property. The police action was started after one of the owners of Water Bus Ltd  spotted one of the compressors in Mr Spiteri’s workshop at Luqa. The compressors had allegedly been stolen from company at Corradino Industrial Zone.

Mr Spiteri was handed a two-year jail term suspended for four years.

But his lawyers argued on appeal that the prosecution had failed to prove that the five compressors had actually belonged to the company.

No documents, chassis numbers, log books or purchase contracts had been produced to prove the true ownership of the allegedly stolen equipment found in possession of the appellant.

There was “not a single paper in the whole file that made reference to Water Bus Ltd” the defence had argued.

Countering this argument, the Attorney General pointed out that Mr Spiteri had claimed to have bought the compressors from a total stranger, without questioning their origin, thereby rendering his version rather less credible.

Moreover, the fact that he had not even checked the functionality of the equipment and had paid €200 for each compressor, sold on the market for €4,700, cast doubt upon his insistence that he had no idea of the illegal origin of the compressors.

The Court of Criminal Appeal, presided over by Mr Justice Antonio Mizzi, observed that for the offence of handling stolen property to subsist, it was crucial to prove that that the allegedly stolen property actually belonged to the dispossessed owner.

In this case, the person who filed the police report had only done so after spotting a compressor at the accused’s workshop and claimed that it was identical to the ones stolen from his factory six months earlier.

A court-appointed expert had received no feedback from the foreign manufacturer to determine the origin of the equipment, the court observed.