The Maltese Court has significantly increased the damages that former mobile operator Redtouch Fone must pay to telecommunications company Aspider Solutions Malta, raising the amount from just over €6,600 to more than €158,000 after finding that an earlier judgement contained an accounting error.
Lawyer Paul Radmilli, who represented Aspider Solutions Malta in the proceedings alongside Cedric Mifsud outlined the contents of the case in an article for Mifsud and Mifsud Advocates. Redtouch Fone was owned by the Labour Party, and its CEO was Jason Micallef, the Chairman of the Valletta Cultural Agency. Mr Micallef was Secretary General of the Labour Party and was later appointed Executive Chairman of ONE Productions Ltd.
The ruling was delivered by the Court of Appeal on 30th April 2026 in the case of Aspider Solutions Malta Limited versus Redtouch Fone Limited. The Court partially upheld an appeal filed by Aspider and increased the damages award from €6,659 to €158,257.04.
The dispute centred on a contract between the two companies for the provision of mobile telephony services. Aspider acted as the network enabler behind Redtouch Fone, meaning its earnings depended on the number of customers using Redtouch’s services.
According to the Court case, the agreement was signed for an initial three-year period and included automatic two-year renewals unless either party gave notice to terminate it. The contract was last renewed in October 2017, meaning it remained valid until October 2019.
However, Redtouch Fone informed Aspider that it intended to terminate the agreement by the end of 2018. The parties attempted to reach an out-of-Court settlement but failed to do so.
The courts found that Redtouch had breached the contract and acted in bad faith when it began encouraging its customers to switch to other mobile service providers before the agreement had properly ended. This process, known in the telecommunications industry as "porting out", resulted in customers leaving Redtouch and consequently reduced the income Aspider would have earned through the partnership.
The Court of First Instance had already ruled that Redtouch's actions were unlawful and constituted a breach of its contractual obligations. However, when calculating damages, it deducted certain costs twice, leading to a substantially lower compensation figure.
Aspider appealed, arguing that the Court had made an accounting mistake when calculating lost profits. The Court of Appeal agreed, finding that costs already included in the original profit calculations had been deducted again, artificially reducing the damages award. As a result, the compensation was revised upwards to €158,257.04.
