Corrupt driving examiner exposed by MaltaToday pleads guilty to accepting bribes

Nicolai Magrin, one of five ADT examiners arrested in 2007 in connection with a notorious bribery scandal and convicted, on appeal, of running over a pensioner whilst three times over the drink-driving limit, has been handed a suspended sentence and interdicted for ten years after he admitted to having accepted bribes in April 2006 and the preceding months.

Magrin pleaded guilty on the 30 July this year, after the defence and the Attorney General had filed a joint note requesting a suspended sentence and perpetual general interdiction in return for a guilty plea.

Magistrate Consuelo Scerri Herrera sentenced the corrupt 41-year-old to two years' imprisonment, suspended for four, as well as placing him under a general interdiction for ten years.

In 2006, the courts had sentenced a number of persons who had paid bribes to the accused, including one who, having failed the driving test seven times, paid Magrin Lm50 (€116) to pass.

The ADT bribery racket had been uncovered following an investigation by the MaltaToday into claims that the authority had received serious reports of bribery implicating its driving examiners, a motoring school and one of the canvassers of former minister Jesmond Mugliett.

Mugliett was forced to launch an inquiry, after which the police pressed charges. The subsequent inquiry had confirmed this newspaper’s investigations, which had also exposed how the authority had covered up and protected Magrin, a corrupt and alcoholic driving examiner who had run over the elderly father of Labour MP Joseph Cuschieri while driving with three times the legal blood-alcohol level. 

The resulting inquiry into the Transport Authority’s bribery scandal had concluded that “had not the article on the traffic accident of 29 April 2006 in which Nicolai Magrin was involved appeared in the MaltaToday of 18 June 2006, it might well have transpired that this traffic accident would have gone unprosecuted.”

Magrin had previously been convicted of having set fire to his own car and filing a false report to the police, and was condemned to a nine-month jail term suspended for 18 months. A witness had seen Magrin emerging from the smoking vehicle and running away. Magrin then reported the fire to the police and said he suspected involvement by his wife as pay-back for a police report he had filed against her the day before.