A man who was found guilty of stealing €1,700 from a gas cylinder delivery truck has won a battle to overturn his punishment for breaching bail conditions, having already been punished for this crime.

Keith Cremona, 32, had been found guilty in January of having stolen a pouch containing the cash from the cabin of the truck in Santa Venera in 2016.

The court of Magistrates had convicted the man of aggravated theft and of breaching bail for another offence and jailed him for 1 year suspended for 2. Cremona had also been ordered to forfeit his €10,000 bail guarantee.

Cremona had filed an appeal, arguing that witnesses had not seen him enter the truck’s cabin and had only seen a man of similar stature to the accused, wearing a hood, running away.

However, the man had also been arraigned in October 2018 for breaching the same set of bail conditions and had been jailed for six months and fined €2,400. His bail deposit was not forfeited.

Defence lawyer David Gatt had argued that the second charge was a breach of the ne bis in idem principle, which states that a person can only be punished once for the same offence.

In fact, the man’s personal guarantee of €10,000 had already been converted into a six month prison sentence by a previous magistrate.

The Court of Criminal Appeal, presided by madam justice Consuelo Scerri Herrera, deciding the appeal, said that the first court had been correct in finding the man guilty of theft, but also noted that his personal guarantee had already been converted into a prison sentence and therefore abstained from considering it further.

The court observed that the man had a number of previous convictions for theft and other petty crimes and that he had not seized the opportunities given to him by the court. There was no reason for it to change the punishment handed down by the first court with regards to the first charge, but reformed the judgment with regards to the charge of breaching bail, thereby sparing the man an extra 6 month stint in prison.