Court agency under pressure over ‘shameful’ state of evidence strong room

The agency running Malta’s courts is under pressure to upgrade the conditions in which evidence is stored, amidst claims Keith Schembri’s mobile phone was misplaced. 

The Court Services Agency (CSA) is in the spotlight over what one magistrate described as the “shameful and embarrassing” state of the courts’ strong room, in which evidence is stored. 

Contacted by the MaltaToday on Tuesday, the agency’s CEO, Eunice Grech Fiorini, declined to comment in the light of the constitutional case against the CSA and others, filed by former OPM chief of staff Keith Schembri.  Asked whether the court administration had done anything to address the problem and whether she agreed that the current situation primarily favours the guilty, as it would result in the loss or inadmissibility of incriminating evidence, Fiorini replied that speaking to the media at this stage would not be appropriate. 

“We believe that it is more appropriate to reply to both the constitutional case and the communicated note through proper judicial means,” the CEO told MaltaToday. 

Schembri is claiming that his right to a fair hearing has been breached and is requesting the removal from evidence in his money laundering case of a mobile phone that his lawyers claim had “disappeared” for several weeks before turning up amongst the exhibits in a separate case. 

In an application filed on 6 November against the Attorney General, the Police Commissioner and the Registrar Criminal Courts and Tribunals, Schembri demanded that the phone be expunged from the evidence in the case against him, suggesting that there was a sinister motive behind what he described as the misplacing and subsequent discovery of his phone. 

The application was filed a few weeks after the magistrate presiding over the compilation of evidence, Donatella Frendo Dimech, had dictated a strongly worded note, slamming the “shameful and embarrassing” state of the strong room where evidence is preserved in court and the manner in which it is maintained as “absolute abandonment,” with court staff having to buy sticky tape to seal evidence boxes themselves and describing laptops covered in mould. 

The state in which evidence is preserved can make or break a case, the magistrate stressed, as she called upon the Ministry for Justice to immediately take the necessary steps to address the problem.

Schembri’s lawyers see an opportunity 

But it would appear that Schembri’s lawyers are now trying to conflate the magistrate’s valid concerns with the less likely claim that Schembri’s physical phone had been misplaced or tampered with whilst in court custody. 

Doubt has already been cast on that claim in the written submissions made by the registrar of Criminal Courts and Tribunals in a Constitutional case filed by Schembri  

Lawyer Vanessa Grech, representing the registrar, told Mr. Justice Mark Simiana, presiding over the Constitutional case, that it was not true that the exhibit in question -Keith Schembri’s mobile phone- had been lost, misplaced or displaced from the court’s strongroom where it was originally deposited.  

Furthermore, she explained, the court expert Keith Cutajar had only exhibited the data extracted from a number of devices – which did not in any case include Keith Schembri’s phone – together with his report on that data. Those devices were then formally, not physically, exhibited in the Zenith money laundering case. 

Keith Schembri’s mobile phone was exhibited in separate criminal proceedings against him and had been examined by court expert Martin Bajada, who had since tendered his report together with a hard drive containing the extracted data to the inquiring magistrate. 

On the subject of the magistrate’s criticism of the state in which the exhibits were stored, Grech stressed that although the exhibits had not been placed on shelves due to their sheer number, they were “all catalogued and easily traceable.” 

Mr Justice Simiana rejected Schembri’s requests to prevent the next sitting in the compilation of evidence to be brought forward to Friday, ruling that he could not see how the disappearance or reappearance of the phone could prejudice Schembri’s rights, as there was nothing stopping the experts from testifying again in the criminal proceedings, and pointing out that no evaluation of evidence takes place during the compilation stage anyway. 

When the compilation proceedings continued on Friday, Magistrate Frendo Dimech confirmed that all the electronic equipment, including Schembri’s seized mobile phones, had been physically exhibited in July 2023 and handed over to the court’s exhibits officer three days later, for safekeeping. 

All of the exhibits relating to Keith Schembri had “remained in the possession and the exclusive, uninterrupted, custody of that official,” said the court. 

The compilation of evidence continues later this month.