A former editor of the Maltese daily newspaper L-Orizzont has been ordered to pay Opposition leader Simon Busuttil €3,000 in damages after the court deemed that the contents of a story it published was libellous.
In April 2014, the newspaper carried a story claiming that Dr Busuttil, who at the time was an MEP, had failed to declare his earnings from a legal firm which had been awarded €1.2 million in government contracts. The story was based on Dr Busuttil’s European Parliament declaration of assets for 2011, which included no revenue from Europa Research & Consultancy Services Ltd.
In its decision, the court, pre-sided over by Magistrate Francesco Depasquale, noted that the author of the story had drawn his conclusions without carrying out the necessary verifications.
It transpired that Dr Busuttil had a third of the shares in Gansam Holdings, a shareholder in ERCS. However, in 2011 Gansam Holdings declared no dividends, meaning Dr Busuttil did not make any profit as the earnings were retained on the company’s books.
Consequently, it was not true that Dr Busuttil had failed in his obligation to declare earnings from the firm. Moreover, the complainant had no direct interest in ERCS and so could have never profited directly from any potential earnings.
The court noted that although this information was publicly available, the story’s author had omitted important facts and could have tarnished Dr Busuttil’s reputation.
For this reason, it ordered the L-Orizzont editor at the time, Sandro Mangion, to pay €3,000 in damages to Dr Busuttil.