A re­tired fire of­fi­cer has been grant­ed $750,000 bail af­ter ap­pear­ing in court charged with mar­i­jua­na traf­fick­ing.

Mal­colm Fourneil­li­er, 54, of Bit­tern Boule­vard, Mal­oney Gar­dens, D’Abadie, was grant­ed bail when he made his first court ap­pear­ance be­fore High Court Mas­ter Kim­i­tria Gray yes­ter­day.

Fourneil­li­er was ar­rest­ed last Thurs­day af­ter po­lice of­fi­cers from the North­ern Di­vi­sion’s Op­er­a­tion/In­tel­li­gence Unit raid­ed his home.

The of­fi­cers al­leged­ly found a black bag in a bed­room, which con­tained 20 pack­ets of mar­i­jua­na weigh­ing a to­tal of 10 ki­los.

In a press re­lease af­ter the pur­port­ed dis­cov­ery, the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice (TTPS) es­ti­mat­ed the val­ue of the drugs to be $890,942.

Dur­ing the hear­ing, po­lice pros­e­cu­tors did not ob­ject to bail for Fourneil­li­er, who they ad­mit­ted had a clean crim­i­nal record be­fore be­ing charged.

While Fourneil­li­er’s lawyer Keron Ramkhal­whan wel­comed the po­si­tion, he took is­sue with the po­lice’s val­u­a­tion of the drugs. He sug­gest­ed that the val­ue was in­flat­ed to sen­sa­tion­alise the mag­ni­tude of the seizure.

Af­ter set­ting con­di­tions for Fourneil­li­er’s bail, Mas­ter Gray trans­ferred his case to the Ari­ma Dis­trict Court.

Fourneil­li­er is sched­uled to reap­pear in court on Feb­ru­ary 18. —DEREK ACHONG