Romanian racket busted

Ilie Nicolae, 28, Niculae Dragos, 22, Dumitru Marius, 26, and Christian Panaitescu, 25, pleaded guilty to 14 counts of theft from shops in Sliema and St Julians, the Point shopping centre, Bay Street shopping complex in the past month.

Another man, Marian Panaitescu, 26, of Romania, pleaded guilty to the sole charge of handling stolen items and was given a three-year conditional discharge.

A sixth Romanian, 27-year-old Niculae Florica, was the only man who denied all the charges of theft and was remanded in preventive custody.

The six men were arrested on Friday evening after the owner of Diesel and Levi's, Leonard Cassar, recognised them from closed camera footage of his stores where they stole around €1,000 worth of clothing two weeks previously.

On Saturday, Police sources told MaltaToday that they had just performed a number of searches at the residences of a group of Romanian Roma gypsies residing in Malta, who allegedly form part of a racket.

The searches not only yielded thousands of euros worth of fashion items stolen from shops across the Sliema area, but revealed patterns of how the community of Roma are slowly infiltrating Maltese society with overcrowded apartments and trickery items used to perform thefts.

On Saturday, Police also told MT that the six Romanian men were to be arraigned yesterday morning.

It is being alleged that a racket comprising of Romanians working in groups of six or seven, have been caught shop lifting red-handed by the Msida police after a spate of robberies in the Sliema area.

The alleged criminals were walking into clothes shops in the Sliema area, including Urban Jungle, carrying sports bags lined with aluminium foil, which would block the outlets' miniature security alarms. 

An entrepreneur, who co-owns a number of fashion shops in the Sliema area, said that "shopkeepers raised the alarm when employees of a spate of fashion outlets noted through close-circuit security cameras that the group was stealing clothes by placing them in bags. The foil lined in the bags apparently would help prevent the alarm going off, with the thieves' stolen items going unnoticed.

"Beforehand, the thieves would walk into the outlets in groups of six or seven and distract the manager and other shop employees while one or two forming part of the group would steal the clothes."

Following these widespread incidents the shop owners - who, according to police, couldn't stand the thefts any longer - teamed up and lodged a report to the police.

Police have also expressed their concern that this is a growing racket as "reports of shoplifting by Roma gypsies have more than quadrupled in a space of three months".