Retired judge awarded €9,000 in libel damages over Times article

A retired judge has been awarded €9,000 in compensation over a newspaper article containing spurious allegations that he had benefited from an MPs state pension, in addition to his regular pension, despite not having satisfied the length of service requirement.

Ex-judge and former labour MP Philip Sciberras had filed for libel against Times of Malta journalist Ivan Camilleri and editors Mark Wood and Herman Grech, over the article which was published both online and in print on March 18, 2018.

In a decision handed down yesterday, Magistrate Victor Axiaq ruled that the article was “a result of disdain and contempt towards a person who in the mind of the author had been politically assisted by the Government and who had to therefore be publicly exposed for what he did.”

The magistrate observed that Camilleri seemed to want to create a distinction between that which normal people receive and that which was reserved for a “privileged” few. “Whatever the reasoning in the mind of the author, this does not justify that which he ended up writing, once it emerged that this was nothing more than an article full of mistakes and gratuitous suppositions.”

Instead of attacking the system of MP pensions, said the magistrate, the author had chosen to attack the integrity of a person who had built his professional career “exclusively on his integrity and trustworthiness as a judge in the highest Maltese courts.”

At no stage did the defendants attempt to apologise for the allegations, even when they were contradicted by the facts which emerged, noted the court. “Rather, they continued to insist on the veracity of the facts (something which they subsequently failed to prove) and at a late stage, tried to turn the clear meaning of the article upside down (by for example saying that there was nothing in the article which said he took something which he didn’t deserve and was misinterpreting the article, because there was nothing wrong in putting legitimate pressure to obtain something he was entitled to).”

As a result of the article, the Auditor General had investigated the retired judge and found no wrongdoing.

In view of these factors, the court awarded Sciberras €9,000 in compensation, declaring the article to be defamatory.