The High Court has ordered the surrender of Tomasz Fil to Poland, where he is to serve a one-year prison sentence following a conviction connected with diesel thefts from a fuel truck.
In a judgment delivered on 13 March 2009, Mr Justice Michael Peart found that the conduct set out in the European arrest warrant corresponded to theft under section 4 of Ireland’s Criminal Justice (Theft and Fraud Offences) Act 2001. The court therefore made the surrender order sought by the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform.
The warrant said that on unspecified days in November 2001, Fil and two others broke into a KRAS truck’s fuel tank four times using a master key, then stole about 15 litres of diesel each time. The total value was stated as about PLN 150, to the detriment of a company in Krosno.
Fil’s sentence was imposed in Poland on 9 April 2002 and initially suspended for three years. Information provided by the Polish judicial authority said the suspension was lifted on 28 July 2004 after its conditions were breached. A later letter said Fil had failed to make restitution to the injured party and had committed another offence during the relevant period.
The Minister advanced three possible corresponding offences: theft, handling stolen property and conspiracy to commit theft. The judge rejected handling as a match, leaving theft and conspiracy for consideration. The court’s decision turned on whether the warrant described conduct that would constitute theft under Irish law.
For Fil, counsel argued that the warrant did not set out enough to establish dishonest intention, lack of the owner’s consent or an intention to deprive the owner of the diesel. The Minister’s counsel submitted that the description, including the use of the word “stole” and the repeated break-ins, supported those elements.
The judge concluded that the word “stole”, read with the circumstances in the warrant, left no room for doubt that the owner had not consented, that the property rights had been interfered with and that there was an intention to deprive the owner of the diesel. The court found correspondence established with the Irish theft offence. It did not find that handling stolen property corresponded, and the judgment does not separately state a finding on conspiracy.
The court also recorded that identity was not disputed, the sentence met the minimum gravity requirement, and no undertaking under section 45 was required because Fil had been present at his conviction and sentence. Having found no other statutory bar to surrender, subject to the correspondence issue, the judge ordered surrender. The ruling concerns execution of the Polish sentence; it does not determine a new Irish criminal charge.