A reporter who mistakenly reported that Amber won the Malta Eurovision Song Contest is no longer employed by Eurovision.tv.

"Let us say that he has resigned," Anton Attard, CEO of PBS said.

He explained on TVM that PBS as the organiser of the contest had protested to the European Broadcasting Union after its official website announced Amber as the winner on Saturday night.

The news was uploaded while televoting was still in progress and well before Gianluca Bezzina was announced as the winner.

The item was removed after a few minutes and the website issued an apology blaming technical difficulties.

PBS CEO Anton Attard said PBS had nothing to do with the item but the station immediately protested.

"They took the matter extremely seriously. This could have been prejudicial to the contest. Just imagine what would have happened had Amber actually won the contest. Think of the conspiracy theories," he said.

EBU STATEMENT

Meanwhile, Jarmo Sim, Communications Coordinator, Eurovision Events, (EBU) n a statement said:

“To ensure that we are as fast as possible in publishing the winners of the national selections, we always prepare several articles beforehand with the names of different artists. Due to a human error, one of those articles was published prematurely, containing the name of an incorrect winner. We apologise to PBS and the participants for any inconvenience this may have lead to. The editor responsible has resigned from his position."

AMBER AND TEAM DISAPPOINTED

Amber and her team also expressed their disappointment on facebook last Saturday.

"After a very long week tonight we had a huge disappointment, not because our performances could have been better, on the contrary, we were very pleased with these however, someone decided to upload an article of what he thought would happen while the televoting was still open.

"This  article insinuated that Amber won when the winner was not chosen yet. This led to many complaints backstage and online and several negative comments from viewers some directly to Amber and Paul and Fleur Balzan as composer and author. Someone else's mistake was suffered by us who at that moment were at the stage greenroom and only started learning of this as comments were coming in. Does this person know the damage done at a time when people were still deciding who they wanted to vote for?

"Our reputations speak differently but people rightly so, believe what they read this time at our expense!"

COMMENTS ON WINNING SONG

Regarding comparisons between the winning song and another one, Mr Attard said the issue was flagged early on and the matter was checked. This, he said, was a different song although the same instrument with a particular sound was used.

Sign up to our free newsletters

Get the best updates straight to your inbox:
Please select at least one mailing list.

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By subscribing, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing.