Patrick Spiteri bail revoked after AG's appeal

Spiteri has been in custody since may after he was extradited to Malta from England to face charges of fraud and misappropriation that total some €7.4 million. He was granted bail in one of his pending cases last week

A decree granting bail to former lawyer Patrick Spiteri under strict conditions which resembled house arrest has been revoked after an appeal by the Attorney General, the court holding that house arrest is not a form of bail but a form of arrest.

Spiteri, who was extradited to Malta from England in May to face charges of fraud and misappropriation that total some €7.4 million has been held in custody since then, despite filing bail requests before several courts.

He asked for bail, primarily on health grounds, but also claims he is unable to physically access the hundreds of boxes of documents he says he needs for his defence in prison. Some of the documents are being held in court and another part being held in a Guardamangia property, which has been seized by HSBC.

Earlier this week, Magistrate Claire Stafrace Zammit had granted Spiteri bail, after observing that the proceedings had been at a very advanced stage before the European Arrest Warrant was issued against him and that he had kept in contact with this lawyers while he was in England receiving treatment for Behchett’s Syndrome.

The 51-year-old who was arrested in a police raid on his wife’s Surrey estate, had previously been on the run from the Maltese courts on eight separate cases linked to fraud and misappropriation charges.

Spiteri absconded from Malta after claiming he was unable to be present in court due to an alleged illness, which led him to seek treatment in London

Last week Magistrate Stafrace Zammit had granted the man bail due to the fact that the accused had remained in a state of arrest to this day, because there had not been any pronouncements on his bail requests.

The magistrate assessed the crimes Spiteri is accused of as “serious but not most serious”. After seeing that the accused was offering a third party guarantor and had a fixed address in Malta and after taking into consideration his documented medical condition, the former lawyer was granted bail under very strict conditions.

Aside from providing substantial monetary guarantees, Spiteri was to hand in his ID card and passport to court and he was prohibited from leaving his residence under any circumstances. The Police were to ensure that he was sticking to the conditions by visiting three times a week.

The Attorney General filed an appeal against the decree the next day, arguing that Spiteri had effectively been granted house arrest, which does not exist under Maltese law.

In a decision handed down today, the criminal court quashed the bail decree because the "house arrest" imposes too many restrictive conditions and was not a correct form of bail.

Judge Edwina Grima  decreed that house arrest,  in essence, is not liberty but a state of arrest.  Therefore, the Criminal Court said,  if the Court of Magistrates believed that Spiteri ought to have been given bail, then it should have granted him effective liberty and not kept him in a state of arrest at home.  The court deemed house arrest to be too restrictive to be considered as a form of  bail and consequently quashed the decree, in line with leading judgments by the European Court of Human Rights.

The judge refrained from passing comment on whether Spiteri ought to be given bail.

Lawyer Stefano Filletti is defence counsel to Spiteri.