Neville Gafa attacks procedure, not substance

TMIS libel case goes to Constitutional Court

Office of the Prime Minister employee and mystery diplomat Neville Gafa is leaving no stone unturned in his increasingly desperate attempts to either silence witnesses willing to spill the beans on the medical visas scam he is accused of perpetrating or to have them silenced one way or another by the courts.

Gafa travelled to Libya earlier this year after this newspaper had released, in court, a list of Libyan witnesses it intended to call to testify in libel proceedings Gafa had instituted against this newspaper and its editor.

Gafa quickly travelled to Libya under the guise of a diplomatic mission, even though no ministry at the time would take responsibility for the trip, where he offered witnesses impressive sums of hush money in return for keeping quiet on the medical visas scandal and not testifying in court. Those antics were reported by this newspaper.

When that failed, Gafa’s lawyers this week tried to prevent witnesses from testifying, using every trick in the book to have hearing delayed or thrown out. His legal team objected to the use of Skype for videoconferencing, calling into question standard procedure, and objected to the videoconference not having taken place in a Libyan court of law, even though it is standard practice for such videoconferences not to be conducted in a courtroom, particularly in a war-torn country.

They even took Magistrate Victor Axiak to task time and time again during and after the hearing in their desperate bids to disallow the Libyan witnesses from providing their testimony on the trials and tribulations they had been put through.

Monday’s hearing

During Monday’s hearing, witnesses described in detail how Gafa had solicited them for funds for treatment that was meant to have been free of charge according to a bilateral agreement between Malta and Libya. They also described how Gafa had offered them between €200,000 and €300,000 in hush money not to testify.

In all, five witnesses testified from Zitan, Libya, telling Magistrate Victor Axiaq that Gafa had first demanded €2,500 for medical visas and then offered them thousands of euros to buy their silence.

Gafa had decided to sue The Malta Independent on Sunday editor David Lindsay over a story stating that a number of Libyan nationals had been made to pay for medical visas for treatment in Malta even though bilateral agreement was signed between Malta and Libya to treat Libyans wounded in the hostilities in their homeland.

The witnesses, cross-examined by defence lawyer Peter Fenech, said that Gafa had approached them with an interpreter once they had arrived in Malta.

“I was in hospital. There was security,” said one. “They resist any visitor. They said this order came from Mr Neville Gafa. They closed the doors and said no one enter or exit.”

Asked if he had ever spoken to Gafa, the man said he had met him in hospital, where Gafa had introduced himself as “the agent of the Government of Malta.”

Gafa had demanded €2,500 to let him stay in Malta, one said. The money was supposed to be for visas and to complete his medical treatment. Fenech exhibited a video recording of a statement released by one of the men.

“Did you give him the money?” asked the lawyer. “I didn’t give anything and the rest of the wounded… some of them give and some of them don’t have money. And he told them to contact their families to send the money,” replied the witness.

Attacking procedure instead of substance

It soon became clear that Gafa and his legal team, unable to attack the substance of the testimony given in court this week, which had formed the basis of this newspaper’s investigations, has instead resorted to attempts to attack the procedure.

After Monday’s damning court session, Gafa, and his new lawyers — his brief, former Police Commissioner Peter Paul Zammit, who was on Monday joined by lawyers Edward Gatt and Mark Vassallo — still had a trick or two up their sleeves, and on Wednesday filed Constitutional Court proceedings to have that damning testimony expunged from the court record.

They filed constitutional proceedings against the attorney general decrying the “amateurish” way in which the latest sitting in the libel case had been held.

But in a court application filed yesterday, Gafa’s lawyers, Edward Gatt and Mark Vassallo, said that presiding Magistrate Victor Axiak had shown “great hostility” towards the accused and his lawyers when they opposed the production of witnesses who had not testified before the prosecution closed its evidence in 2018.

The new witnesses had not been accompanied by any judicial authority or official in Libya said the lawyers, “but rather, everything points to this videoconference being a private activity organised by these individuals, or rather, by whoever is behind them.”

Gafa argued that “immediately, massive communication problems emerged,” as the individuals spoke in a Libyan dialect and not Arabic, requiring two interpreters.

“At the same time, a person was identified who claimed to be their interpreter. Asked by the court what qualifications he had, this person replied that he was a teacher, but a teacher of what nobody knows for sure.”

They argued that video quality was very bad and the picture was elongated to the point where the full faces of the interpreter and the witness were not visible, said the lawyers. Neither was it possible to ascertain that the witnesses, who testified individually, were in separate rooms or gathering behind the camera, just out of shot, when not testifying.

As it was not possible to crossexamine someone who had not first testified, the court had ordered that the men testify, only for them to be “bombarded with direct questions by the defendant’s lawyer,” Gafa’s counsel complained.

Denouncing the sitting as “Babylon”, Gafa said the shambolic way the videoconference was conducted was not only unbefitting a court of law, but also breached his fundamental human rights.

“It is a fact that what the plaintiff in this case is claiming was in fact much worse for those present in the courtroom and the video… clearly would be much more indicative of the Babylon which the Court of Magistrates permitted in this case.”

The court application ends with a demand that the court declare that Gafa had suffered a breach of his right to a fair hearing and order that the entire video and relevant transcripts of testimony be expunged from the acts of the proceedings.

Both cases continue.