If Judge Toni Abela wanted to give an objective assessment of my journalistic work, he would have ran a Google search and made an assessment with the online and available biographies including from Wikipedia. The Judge didn’t do that. In order to pass judgement over my work the Judge exclusively quoted his old friend, who also happens to be a competitor of mine, Saviour Balzan.
Judge Toni Abela couldn’t have been more sloppy in exposing his obvious and blatant political bias in the sentence. With his decision, the Judge didn’t just hit against the right to publish, he also gave a distinctive and exceptional privilege to the Labour Party MP, Rosianne Cutajar.
The origins of this case are very important to put into context how the State and the government have both constantly covered up, protected and even granted privileges to Rosianne Cutajar simply for the fact that she is a Labour MP. Now, her privileges have been confirmed and recognised by the Court.
Rosianne Cutajar initiated a vexatious libel case against me over claims that were true. She also initiated a criminal case which she lost. Halfway through her libel case, and as soon as she was about to testify, I published Yorgen Fenech’s chats with her and Rosianne Cutajar dropped her libel case.
Despite opening a vexatious libel case, I still had to pay Court fees and my lawyers still had to be paid for the great work they do. I had to finance two Court cases for revealing compromising information about a government MP even when I technically won both cases. All along, the Labour Party propaganda machine spread lies about me on a regular basis and Labour Party supporters relished in hatred towards their new enemy.
When I released the chats, Rosianne Cutajar went to the Office of the Attorney-General with her lawyer David Gatt, and submitted a request to the AG to initiate a criminal investigation against me. It was the first time in my life that I heard of someone so privileged that they could walk into the Attorney General’s office, request a criminal investigation, and have the AG immediately comply. No one in Malta has ever been treated with such privilege. It doesn’t end there.
Following the publication of the chats, Police officers who were already investigating Rosianne Cutajar over money-laundering read these chats for the very first time. Incredibly, these chats were never used by investigative police officers to investigate her over corruption. Police officers picked up the content in relation to the fraudulent contract that Rosianne Cutajar received from the Institute of Tourism Studies. The Police proceeded to investigate and even called in Rosianne Cutajar for an interrogation.
If the chats were not published this Police investigation would have never happened and the Judge has the gall to quote his old friend with vexatious claims about me and claim that there was no public interest in the publication of the chats. The investigation is still ongoing, although I am sure that the Attorney-General is doing her best to prevent Rosianne Cutajar from being arraigned in Court.
The Court has just confirmed and legitimised the privileged status of a government MP who is above the law, permitted to bully journalists, and granted the extraordinary benefit of having the State censor compromising information about her.
The Prime Minister calls this the “rigid way” of implementing Justice, while the Judge says that we can’t criticise the Justice system.
At this point, removing the chats or not is no longer, although it has never been, about Yorgen Fenech’s Court case. This has turned into a struggle between a politician using state power against a publisher to restrict the right to know. The more the Courts demand that I remove the publications, the more they place me in the difficult position of refusing, as each request is yet another assertion of state power protecting privileged individuals.
Paraphrasing the Judge’s own words, I take my decisions serenely after pondering about them for a long time. If the Judge feels he is pretentious enough as if he is walking in the Shadow of God, I’ll invoke my right of walking in the shadow of the Evangelists. Even Rome thought it was speaking in the name of its gods.
Website Editor
Historian and Publisher
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