Alleged kidnapper Christian Borg has had the licence of his car rental company suspended after a judge rejected an appeal.

Mr Justice Lawrence Mintoff upheld the decision in an unsuccessful appeal by Christian Borg, whose car rental service of over 1,000 vehicles has previously operated under the Goldcar brand.

Transport Malta had already suspended the licence, and Mintoff’s decision confirms that suspension.

Transport Malta suspended Borg’s licence in 2019 after repeated complaints were received about his service.  Court documents show that Borg’s garage licence was for a fleet of 1,145 rental cars  and that in the period between September 2018 and August 2019 he had made a total of 39,066 rentals.

A tribunal had decided that Borg was aware of the issues present in his operations but had done nothing to rectify them.

The Director General for the Consumer Affairs Authority had also said that Borg’s operations had placed a negative light on Malta, especially as it was generally tourists who filed complaints against the operations of his company.

Customers accused the company of overcharging, amongst other things, but Borg claimed that those cases were resolved by the company returning the money in question.

Still, the Director-General said that only a few of the complaints were resolved to the customers’ satisfaction, adding that Borg knew that these complaints had been accumulating for years – to the point that he had even recent another suspension in 2016 which wasn’t enforced – and did nothing to address them.

Mr Justice Lawrence Mintoff confirmed the tribunal’s previous sentence in its entirety, therefore finalising the initial decision.

Borg – together with five other men – is currently also the subject of separate criminal proceedings, in which they are accused of abducting, beating and threatening a man over a missing van.