Construction firm ordered to pay €1.1m damages to family of French teenager killed in Malta holiday villa

The family of a French tourist killed in a wall collapse at a holiday villa in Malta were awarded €1.1 million in damages by a Maltese court.

In a ruling delivered on Friday, a Maltese court ordered a construction company and its two directors to pay damages to the heirs of 19-year-old Quentin Antoine Marie Michel.

The victim died under the rubble of the wall near the pool of the Swieqi villa he had rented out with a group of friends in 2011.
The wall had collapsed on top of Michel while he had been posing for a photograph, pretending to climb the wall surrounding a staircase in the property.

The construction company which had built the property, Buz-Dov Developments, and its directors James Mifsud and Gordon Farrugia were prosecuted, together with the owners of the property.

In a 2019 judgment, magistrate Donatella Frendo Dimech ruled that a “gratuitous danger” had been created when the wall had been built, four years before the accident, by contractors Mifsud and Farrugia without measures being taken to ascertain that it was structurally sound.

READ ALSO: Construction company directors responsible for fatal 2011 wall collapse

Court experts had reported there only being a “smear” of cement holding the bricks together and that the semi-basement wall was both heavily cracked and not anchored to the rock behind it.

Mifsud, Farrugia and the company were subsequently convicted of involuntary homicide and sentenced to two years imprisonment, suspended for four.

In 2015, the Michel family had also filed a civil case for damages against Buz-Dov, Mifsud and Farrugia.

The defendants had attempted to rebut the claim on the basis of contributory negligence on the part of the victim.

But in the decision handed down today, Madam Justice Miriam Hayman had no truck with this argument.

“The most difficult element for the success of the defence of contributory negligence is to prove on the basis of reasonable probability that the deceased, when he accepted to pose for this photo, had any idea that he was putting himself in the danger that had, in fact, occurred, and had chosen to do so regardless,” said the judge.

“Was this unfortunate young man, who after being in our country for a mere two or three hours, who chose to pose for this picture, supposed to know, using logic dictated by normal reasoning and not technical or expert reasoning - the reasoning of the man in the street - and that at the tender age of 19, that it would collapse on top of him the minute it encountered the least bit of pressure?” asked the court.

“The answer, bar any evidence to the contrary which was never exhibited is in the negative. More so when today we are aware of a fact that was unknown to this boy that this wall had not been anchored to anything!”

In calculating the amount to be awarded in damages, the judge took into account the fact that Michel had been a hard worker, simultaneously working three part-time jobs to save up, while planning to specialise in the hospitality industry after completing his studies at business school.

On the basis of testimony and statistical data, the judge set the teen’s average potential annual earnings to be €50,400, multiplying it by 33 years.

The owners of the villa were cleared of all liability, with the court ordering the remaining defendants to pay the Michel family €1,140,955 in damages.

The Michel family was represented by lawyer Michael Zammit Maempel.