Jason Azzopardi accuses top LESA officials of transferring traffic fines onto unsuspecting tourists

An urgent magisterial inquiry has been requested into an alleged multimillion euro racket involving top LESA officials, which fraudulently transferred penalty points incurred by Maltese drivers onto tourist rental cars.

This involved diverting “millions of euros” in fines extracted from rental customers' deposits, into the pockets of private car rental companies, instead of the public purse.

This and other explosive allegations emerge from a court application filed this morning by lawyer Jason Azzopardi.

The application states that drivers who received speeding or other driving fines would approach LESA CEO Svetlick Flores and senior LESA customer care official Neville Camilleri - also a Rahal Gdid local councillor elected on a Labour Party ticket - who would use a software “backdoor” to access the LESA computer database undetected.

LESA CEO Svetlick Flores (left) and senior LESA customer care official Neville Camilleri (right)

From here, they would remove the contravention records and associated licence points from the “client” drivers and transfer them on to tourist rental vehicles, whose drivers would be none the wiser. 

As the tourists’ driving licences are not Maltese, none of the licence penalty points would have any effect on them after they leave the islands.

The racket has ingeniously created a win-win situation for all involved, bar LESA, reads the application. “The Maltese person’s licence penalty points and fine are forgiven, and his driving licence is saved. The car hire company pockets the fine deducted from the tourist’s credit card and the tourist…leaves [with no penalty points].”

Azzopardi’s application outlines how the alleged scheme works:

“1. The tourist goes to the car hire office, decides what car he wants and signs a contract for a period of time at an agreed price.

2. The tourist also signs a document, declaring in advance, that if he receives a ticket for an offence which puts points on his licence, he accepts that those points would be transferred to him. “But In truth nothing will be transferred and the points will be deleted because a tourist has a foreign licence that isn’t in the Maltese driving licence database.”

3. The tourist then pays for the rental in advance upon taking delivery of the car

4. When taking payment for the rental, the car hire company also makes a €350 pre-authorisation on the credit card to cover future traffic fines or insurance excesses that may arise. The pre authorization is money blocked on the tourist's credit card.

5. If a tourist commits a ticketable offence, regardless of whether they are still in Malta or not, the tourist will receive a copy of the ticket and can pay it directly on the LESA website. But the majority of tourists simply leave the matter in the hands of the car hire company, who should pay the fine on their behalf.

6. Before the fine is paid, a declaration is sent to LESA, asking to transfer the penalty points on to the tourist.

When dropping off a rental car, in a hurry not to miss their flights home, tourists would not question a €60 charge to their credit card for a traffic violation, much less return to Malta to contest it. 

“In an ingenious and perfidious manner, but with almost pathological malice, this racket used common sense and organised evil, aided by an intentional lack of audit and forensic verification, in order for the public treasury to lose millions, while the corrupt line their pockets.”

Although the scheme described was the most frequently used, Azzopardi said that there was also a second method, in which the tourist’s signature is copied from the rental contract, which LESA has a right to request, and forged on the Licence Penalty Points declaration.

In the application, Azzopardi said that he has a number of witnesses willing to testify in the inquiry about the fact that many car rental companies are well aware of this racket which, he says, is widely used by Labour Party delegates.

“The person making this denunciation knows that Prime Minister Robert Abela and Minister Byron Camilleri also have visibility over this racket and granted it tacit impunity to continue and entrench itself.”

He alleged that while campaigning for last May’s local council elections, Neville Camilleri would tell people in the Rahal Gdid square to speak to anyone they know who had pending fines or licence points and recommend that they speak to him “so I can get them forgiven”.

When such individuals would go to his LESA office, Camilleri “with the blessing, complicity and help of Svetlick Flores,” would use the backdoor access to the LESA computer system and transfer the licence points away from the Maltese person who had reached out to him, and on to a tourist “who had the misfortune of renting a car in their name, in Malta”.

The lawyer estimated that hundreds of people had been directed by Labour Party customer care to Neville Camilleri over the last three years, for this purpose.

Azzopardi also declared under oath that his sources include LESA insiders, who are also Labour supporters “who could not bear the filth that is emerging anymore,” as well as private car rental companies and others who bound him under professional secrecy not to reveal their identities. Some had insisted on meeting Azzopardi “at a remote and abandoned place”, so great was their fear of being identified, he said.

In 2022 and 2023, Walid Ouhida, the owner of WT Global, whose fleet of around 360 vehicles makes it Malta’s largest cab supplier, was identified as one of the largest beneficiaries of the racket. The court application states that hundreds of penalty points were transferred away from the cab drivers he employed, on to unsuspecting tourists.

The application calls for a magisterial inquiry to establish whether the crimes of criminal conspiracy, participation in a criminal organisation, making false declarations to a public authority, trading in influence by public officials, and money laundering specifically by Flores and Camilleri.

Azzopardi said that although he had been collecting the information provided by several individuals since November 2023, an inquiry had to be urgently appointed to preserve the evidence. The lawyer claimed that three different sources inside LESA had informed him that a process of deleting the false database entries made by Camilleri was already underway, after Flores got wind of the leak about the racket. 

“Just yesterday, an order was issued to the effect that every LESA employee had to sign a declaration that they had no ‘conflicts of interest’, which effectively intends to stop any employee at LESA from speaking about or revealing the web of corruption inside LESA.”

That order emerges from an email sent yesterday by Marita Bianco, a Senior Officer and Administrator at LESA to all heads of departments at the agency. The email states that the Home Affairs Ministry was ordering them to sign the declaration. “Of all the years since LESA was set up, these declarations were ordered to be signed urgently yesterday.”

The 61-page application requests several avenues of inquiry, in addition to the traffic fine scam. Among the suspected offences that the inquiring magistrate is asked to collect evidence about are bribery and trading in influence by Flores and Camilleri, who Azzopardi claims, had received a cut of the fraudulent fines as well as gifts and other benefits from the car rental companies involved. 

Anthony Tabone (left) and Mauro Bianco (right) posing in separate photos with Minister Byron Camilleri

Another offence alleged in the application is abuse of office. Azzopardi names two individuals as being employed as full time LESA officials: Mauro Bianco, whose LinkedIn profile lists as a secretariat officer at the Home Affairs Ministry, and Community Officer Anthony Tabone, together with Home Affairs Minister Byron Camilleri’s niece, Gail Mizzi - “who is supposedly employed at LESA as a summer worker but is spending [the summer] working at the Ministry for Home Affairs,” had not turned up for work at the LESA offices for months - twelve months, in Tabone and Bianco’s case -  Azzopardi said, “appearing there only once a month to hand over their timesheet in order to be paid.”

The application requests an urgent magisterial inquiry be held in order to preserve the evidence. It cites previous court rulings which had upheld requests for what is becoming an increasingly long list of corruption-related inquiries in Malta; amongst them inquiries into the fraudulent sale of three public hospitals to Vitals Global Healthcare, Identity Malta selling Maltese ID cards to foreign nationals on the basis of forged certificates, alleged payments of kickbacks for selling Maltese citizenship to Russian nationals and the 17 Black inquiry into secret offshore companies allegedly set up to launder kickbacks.