Updated | State seizes €10,132 out of Romanian’s undeclared €16,106 cash cargo

Adrian-Valentin Theodoru, a 37-year-old man from Romania, has been fined €4,026 and had €6,106 confiscated after being found guilty of failing to declare that he was carrying €16,106, upon his arrival in Malta.

Theodoru had arrived on a flight from Turkey on Wednesday at around 10:30am when Customs officers stationed at the airport had stopped him, together with a Romanian woman.

The female suspect was later released from police custody after she was found to be carrying €10,000, an amount equal to the compulsory declaration threshold. The threshold was introduced in 2003 under the External Transactions Act and repeated in the 2007 Cash Control Regulations, as a measure intended to combat money laundering and the financing of terrorism.

Theodoru, who refused to be represented by a lawyer this morning, was found to have failed to declare €15,850, $193 and 426 Romanian Leu. Inspector Antonovitch Muscat told magistrate Gabriella Vella that the Euro equivalent of the global sum amounted to €16,106.

Theodoru pleaded guilty to the charges.

The court explained to the man that the amounts in excess of the €10,000 which he was permitted to carry would be confiscated. In addition to this, he was fined a further €4,026 - equivalent to 25% of the total amount of cash that he had been carrying.

A similar case last week saw a Sicilian man lose close to €19,000, after he failed to declare the €23,000 he was transporting in cash from Sicily. The man had claimed the money was intended to pay salaries and suppliers in Malta.

“Any person travelling to and from Malta is obliged to submit a declaration to Customs, if the traveller is carrying €10,000 or more,” the Customs said this morning in a separate statement.