The man who filed a perjury case against former Parliamentary Secretary Chris Said insisted yesterday his was not a personal vendetta but a necessary step in his battle to regain custody of his only child.

Speaking to The Times through his lawyer, Anthony Xuereb insisted that Dr Said had failed to testify about important aspects of the court proceedings which had led to the loss of his son’s temporary custody and which might have a crucial bearing on the case for permanent custody.

He stressed that what mattered to him was not that Dr Said made a trivial a mistake on whether a hearing was in the afternoon or the evening but that the former parliamentary secretary said that the court, in an evening hearing, had given custody to his client after listening to submissions of all parties.

In fact, he said, the magistrate had heard no submissions, with detrimental effects on the custody of his child. When asked about this, Dr Said yesterday evening insisted that the magistrate had, in fact, listened to Mr Xuereb and his lawyers in a long sitting later that same evening in which he confirmed his previous decision to give custody to the mother.

The technical legal battle started in 2007 as a custody case over a newborn child in which Dr Said, acting in his professional capacity as a lawyer, represented British citizen Helen Milligan against Mr Xuereb.

Eventually Dr Said stopped representing Ms Milligan and practising as a lawyer altogether in 2008 when he was appointed parliamentary secretary. In 2009 he was called to testify about the proceedings that had led to his former client being awarded temporary custody in 2007.

On the basis of that testimony, Mr Xuereb had alleged that Dr Said lied under oath. The claim was dismissed by the police and the Attorney General and then even a magistrates’ court, which ruled that even though Dr Said had made a mistake, he had not committed perjury.

However, on Thursday a court of appeal, presided over by Judge Michael Mallia, overturned that judgment, ruling that Dr Said’s error did in fact constituteprimafacieevidence of possible perjury. He ordered that criminal proceedings should be instituted against him for a court to decide the matter.

Dr Said then stepped down as parliamentary secretary in order to defend himself in this case.

Mr Xuereb’s lawyer Roberto Montalto said yesterday that his client was not after “the pound of flesh” but wanted to fight for the custody of his son, now three years old.

He explained the whole legal process which started on January 19, 2007: On that day, Dr Said filed an application before the duty magistrate at the Gozo Courts, Antonio Micallef Trigona, asking for custody on behalf of Ms Milligan. He also requested that the case be heard with urgency.

The magistrate did not uphold this request, gave Mr Xuereb three days to file his reply, and appointed the hearing to around two weeks later.

Later on that day, however, Dr Said withdrew this application and filed it again before Magistrate Paul Coppini, who by that time had assumed the role of duty magistrate at the Gozo Court.

Mr Xuereb discovered this when he went to court with his reply to the first application, only to be told that it had been withdrawn. He later discovered that an identical application had been filed before another magistrate.

Upon receiving this second application, Magistrate Coppini upheld it, without hearing any submissions from either side, and awarded temporary custody to the mother.

Dr Montalto said that at no time was Mr Xuereb given time to reply to the application or make his case before the magistrate as the decision had already been taken in his absence, adding that this is the subject of a pending Constitutional case.

This, Dr Montalto insisted, was the salient error in the evidence given by Dr Said and which his client was battling. The lawyer stressed that the claim by Dr Said that all sides had been heard before the decision on temporary custody, was wrong and could have a domino effect on the court’s decision on perIf Dr Said were to be found guilty, he could receive anything from a probation order, a conditional discharge or a suspended sentence to a jail term of between seven months and two years.

According to the Constitution, if a jail term exceeds 12 months, he would automatically lose his seat in the House of Representatives.

However, legal sources said a heavy sentence was improbable as Dr Said had a clean criminal record and the court would consider him as a first-time offender.

Sentencing apart, however, he would still have to deal with the political and professional implications of being found guilty of perjury. manent custody – traditionally the parent who wins temporary custody goes on to win permanent custody.

However, when contacted yesterday evening, Dr Said retorted that there was no such tradition and besides, he emphasised that the magistrate had in fact heard Mr Xuereb and his lawyers, only not in the hearing he had indicated in his testimony but in another one heard that same evening.

This, in fact, turns out to be the crux of the dispute on which Dr Said’s political career may hang. Because while Dr Said is stressing the matter was a minor mistake, in which he simply mixed up details of two different hearings, Mr Xuereb is emphasising that the erroneous evidence could have cost him temporary custody of his son.

In any case, Dr Said further defended his case by pointing out that he was giving evidence on procedure, meaning that he was simply illustrating facts (from memory, after a lapse of two years) that could have easily been verified against court documents without him even needing to testify.

Furthermore, he added, when asked, neither Mr Xuereb nor his lawyer in the custody case, who happens to be Labour MP Justyne Caruana, queried him over this error during cross examination, even though they knew he was testifying from memory.

He also explained why he withdrew the first application which had been turned down to file it before another magistrate. “The first magistrate did not see any urgency and I had a panicked mother who wanted to see her newborn son, so withdrawing it and filing it from scratch was our only option.”

However, there was a further development yesterday evening when Dr Montalto told The Times his client would not be interested in pursuing the perjury case if Dr Said were to rectify the situation by declaring that during the custody case Magistrate Coppini had ruled on temporary custody without giving Mr Xuereb the opportunity to react to the application.

“The custody battle is still at appeals stage. If Chris Said admits the mistake, my client would not be interested in the outcome of this perjury case. As I told you before, this is not a personal vendetta against Dr Said but just part of my client’s efforts to win custody of his son,” he said.

But, clearly frustrated by the whole saga, Dr Said said Mr Xuereb had been made such an offer on numerous occasions but these all fell on deaf ears.

In fact, he went on to point out that Mr Xuereb had said in open court that he “had not suffered any prejudice” as a result of his testimony.

“This is his personal vendetta against me,” he insisted.