Legal loophole means hundreds of employment cases are time-barred

A court has called upon Malta’s legislator to close a legal loophole that is being abused by unscrupulous employers to have cases over their non-payment of wages declared-barred.

The law as it stands was being used as a tool that allowed dishonest employers to enjoy impunity for not paying their workers, which is a criminal offence, Magistrate Donatella Frendo Dimech pointed out in a verbal note.

The issue is understood to affect hundreds of cases, including the approximately 150 lawsuits filed by former employees of Genesis Global against it. One of the company’s directors, Yaniv Meydan, was never a resident of Malta and the other two directors, who are Maltese citizens, had resigned just before Genesis Global closed down. 

Earlier this week, in a sitting in one case involving former employees of Genesis Global, the court, presided by Magistrate Donatella Frendo Dimech, dictated a verbal note in all of those cases. The magistrate observed, with evident concern, that the defendant had not been notified and that the prescriptive period for the offences had now lapsed, which means that the case is now time barred and could not be prosecuted further.

The court ordered that a copy of all of the verbal notes it had dictated in every case in which employers had exploited their employees by not paying them, which had to be withdrawn due to the lapse of the one year prescriptive period, be sent to the Prime Minister and the minister for home affairs and employment.