KUALA TERENGGANU: The city council here exercises leniency and offers traffic offenders sufficient opportunity to appeal when slapped with traffic summonses, Mayor Mohd Zulkifli Abu Bakar said today.
He said the council rarely prosecutes motorists for offences like parking, or drag them to court straightaway, based on “humanitarian grounds”.
“We give motorists sufficient chances to settle their summonses by first issuing reminder notices according to procedures, as we record their vehicle registration number, the type of offence and amount summoned for.
“Not only that, we even offer discounts for those with large outstanding summonses,” he said in response to a landmark case in Penang, where a lawyer was acquitted of parking offences on Thursday.
But Zulkifli warned that repeat and persistent offenders would eventually have to deal with the long arm of the law, as their vehicles would be clamped.
“Usually, at this stage, the motorists would settle their outstanding dues.
“However, if they are still stubborn, we would bring them to court to answer for themselves, and if proven guilty, they would have to settle their outstanding summonses or face punishment,” said Zulkifli.
In the Penang case, George Town magistrate Mohamad Amin Shahul Hamid acquitted lawyer and former Bukit Uban assemblyman, R.S.Raveentharan, after the prosecution failed to prove it was the accueed who had commited the parking offences.
There was also no proof of Raveentharan receiving the said summonses from the Penang Island City Council.
The magistrate’s decision was historic, as it will invalidate the council’s previous parking summonses to other motorists as well.