Court throws out appeals on three libel cases filed against Matthew Caruana Galizia

Judge Lawrence Mintoff has thrown out appeals for three libel cases filed by two directors of consultancy group E & S Consultancy Limited against journalist Matthew Caruana Galizia over a series of tweets alleging the group’s involvement in tax fraud.

Lawyer Christian Ellul and accountant Karl Schranz had appealed the court’s decision over defamation suits filed in their names as well as in the company’s name against Caruana Galizia over a series of tweets which were linked to a related article published by The Shift.

Caruana Galizia alleged that the Maltese consultancy firm was involved in tax fraud and money laundering with Marian Kocner, the prime suspect behind the murder of Slovak investigative journalist Jan Kuciak, who was shot alongside his girlfriend in February 2018.

Caruana Galizia had posted the tweets in 2018, four months after his mother, Daphne Caruana Galizia, had been killed, calling for their arrest in Malta.

The journalist alleged that the consultancy group were assisting Kocner and were allegedly involved in the “Slovak-Malta tax fraud.”

He alleged that the Slovak businessman, arrested as the prime suspect behind the murder of Kuciak, had used shell and holding companies set up in Malta and administered by the applicants “as a sort of mini Mossack Fonseca”.

The consultancy group accused Caruana Galizia of having created a connection between the group and its directors and the murder of Kuciak, who had been investigating tax fraud by Kocner and his Maltese advisors.

Kocner’s daughter had previously been married to Ellul.

Since the publications of the tweets, the company said that it has suffered financial losses and a negative reputation.

The court decided that Caruana Galizia’s tweets in no way claimed that an arrest of the directors should be carried out in connection with the murder of Jan Kuciak.

The judgement read that “In this situation, the reader (of the tweets) will view the plaintiff with suspicion, concluding that he is a person suspected by the police of having committed the offence and that they have ground for laying a charge against him. But this does not warrant the conclusion that by reporting the fact of arrest and charge, a newspaper is imputing that the person is guilty,” adding that the two have not been arrested, and the tweets have not led to an imputation of guilt, but rather it is suggesting that there might be cause for arrest based on what Caruana Galizia’s tweets referred to.

The court disagreed with the appellants, who had testified that the reports published by The Shift were not of public interest, and rejected the appeals, confirming the appealed judgement in its entirety.

It ruled that the costs of the appeal are to be borne by the appellant.

The courts had thrown out four libel suits in July 2022, declaring that “the murder of a journalist, more so when that murder was possibly linked to his work, constituted a manifest attack on freedom of expression”. The consultancy firm and the two directors appealed this sentence.

It had ruled that Caruana Galizia’s tweets were based on publications which were a matter of public interest, namely the article by The Shift and Kuciak’s own writings on Aktuality.sk.

The court had concluded that Caruana Galizia had produced “concrete proof” that his comments, which the group claimed were defamatory, were an expression of opinion based on substantive facts existing at the time, deeming his views as an honest opinion, and no evidence was found that he had acted maliciously.

The group had also filed a libel suit against editor of The Shift News Caroline Muscat, which was similarly thrown out.