No Deposit Cars told to delete personal information from video targeting customers

Local car rental company No Deposit Cars, notorious for fleecing its customers, has been instructed to delete personal information it wrongfully posted in an online video ridiculing clients who took legal action against the company.

This emerges from a decision issued by the Information and Data Protection Commissioner Ian Deguara on Monday in relation to a video uploaded to the company’s website and Facebook page on April 1 last year.

The AI-generated video mocks lawyer Jason Azzopardi and several past clients he helped in cases against the company. It claims to be a response to a legal complaint filed by Azzopardi against No Deposit Cars, its parent company Princess Holdings, and owner Christian Borg, a document he had signed.

In the judicial protest, the customers accused Borg of participating in a criminal conspiracy, after forcing or inducing them to pay over €1,000 for imaginary contraventions they were told they had incurred. The customers requested that Borg also be investigated and, ultimately, prosecuted for being part of an organised crime group.

It was the second such video to be uploaded to the company’s Facebook page - the first was aimed at MaltaToday journalists who revealed how scores of former customers planned to sue Borg and the company.

The company is synonymous with its director at the time, Christian Borg - a former legal client of Prime Minister Robert Abela, with whom Abela participated in a property deal in 2018.

Borg is elsewhere charged, together with other associates of his, with kidnapping and savagely beating a former employee of his - apparently over a car that had gone missing.

On Monday, the Information and Data Protection Commissioner ordered No Deposit Cars to remove all the personal data relating to the individuals singled out in the video, as well as all the names, surnames and ID card numbers contained in the judicial protest, within 20 days. The Commissioner also ordered that should this not be possible, the video is to be taken down in its entirety.

Deguara warned that failure to comply with the order in full within that timeframe would result in the imposition of an administrative fine in terms of the regulation, which can reach €20,000,000, or up to 4% of a company’s total worldwide annual turnover in the preceding financial year, if higher than €20 million.