Former minister Austin Gatt was ordered to pay €1,000 in libel damages to MEP Marlene Mizzi over an interview in which he alleged she had wasted public money.

Ms Mizzi said Dr Gatt had initially made the offending statement in Parliament where he was protected by parliamentary privilege. Then, through the newspaper Malta Today, Ms Mizzi said she challenged him to repeat the same statement outside Parliament.

In an interview with Times of Malta on July 1, 2005, under the heading ‘No prospects for national shipping line’, Dr Gatt made the comment again and she sued him for libel.

Ms Mizzi said that at the time she served as chairman of the now defunct national shipping line, Sea Malta, and of a number of other companies. Thus, the allegations made by Dr Gatt, a Cabinet minister, had damaged her professional integrity.

Magistrate Francesco Depas-quale noted that Dr Gatt had declared that during Ms Mizzi’s tenure, the shipping line made a loss of €7.5 million but did not explain how this came about.

He said that Dr Gatt should have gone into much more detail to explain how the company had reached that stage, especially when making such strong allegations.