The police raided the relocated Valletta open market yesterday morning and confiscated around 2,400 fake DVDs, CDs and pirated software.

A number of vendors will be arraigned in court in the coming days.

The Times in fact reported yesterday that Grace Borg, managing director of Visual and Sound Communications sent two of her Exotique employees to the Freedom Square market where cardboards pinned to the side of the stalls priced one DVD for Lm1.50 and five for Lm5. The employees had the luxury of choosing from hundreds of film titles and also some of the latest big screen blockbusters.

They even managed to buy several titles not yet officially available on DVD including Apocalypto, Hot Fuzz and Norbit and when they asked for Spiderman 3, one of the hawkers told the employee to return within six minutes.

The DVDs were handed over in the promised time wrapped in poor-quality photocopied cover, with no label on the disc itself, in a paper bag. Some of the other DVDs were sold in their plastic cover and moreover, none of the stalls gave a VAT receipt.