Car thief's registration plate swap thwarts prosecution charge

Peter Carabott, 52 of Attard, was handed a 13-month jail term suspended for three years for selling a stolen Peugeot 406 back in 2003.

The thief got lucky due to a mix-up by the prosecution on the licence plates belonging to the stolen car in question, a mix-up which was down to Carabott's original plan to swap licence plates.

On 24 January 2003, a certain Philip Sapiano informed the police that his vehicle had been stolen, noting that it was the only Peugeot 406 in 'palombino' brown colour imported to Malta.

Earlier that month, a white Peugeot 406 being used as taxi had been set ablaze and its front-end damaged in the fire. The taxi driver's brother, Joseph Tonna, purchased the damaged taxi and garaged it with the aim of repairing it. The accused, Carabott, approached Tonna to buy the taxi. When Tonna refused, Carabott offered to sell him the brown Peugeot, which Tonna then accepted.

Carabott told Tonna that the licence plates of the two cars had to be swapped, apart from planning the taxi's engine into the brown vehicle and vice-versa. The vehicle's colour in its logbook was also modified, to now read 'palombino brown' as the former taxi's colour.

Years later, the now brown 'taxi' was part-exchanged with a van from car dealer Andrew Debono, which car was sold to Paul Caruana a few days later. When Caruana took the car for its VRT test, it resulted that the chassis number had been tampered with. The car was seized, and the verification of manufacturers'  data revealed that the brown Peugeot was in fact the car stolen back in 2003.

Caruana filed for reimbursement, leading to the arraignment of Tonna and his subsequent admission. The court subsequently found no doubt that Tonna was aware that the car he had purchased from Carabott had been stolen.

On his part, Carabott denied any involvement in the case, but was still arraigned over his involvement, including the theft of the Peugeot. He was charged with the theft of car, but a mix-up in the licence plate identifications - with the police accusing him of stealing the vehicle registered BBN537 (the taxi) rather than the brown Peugeot (ABI421) - meant he could not be found guilty of theft.

Instead he was charged with handling and selling the stolen vehicle, and relapsing. He was found guilty of these charges, but handed a 13-month jail term suspended for three years owing to his clean record and the value of the vehicle being just €2,795.