Court dismisses ex-GRTU director general's libel against former MDA president

The courts have dismissed a libel case filed by former GRTU director general Vince Farrugia against a MaltaToday columnist, over an article which accused the GRTU of piggybacking on the work of the Malta Developers Association.

Magistrate Francesco Depasquale delivered judgement in a libel case filed by former GRTU director Vince Farrugia, over a 2011 MaltaToday op-ed titled “A Cuckoo’s Nest”, which had been penned by architect Michael Falzon, the outgoing President of the Malta Developers Association at the time.

Falzon had accused the GRTU of trying “to take a free ride on what was going to be announced in the budget as a result of MDA's consistent lobbying". Following the 2011 budget speech, GRTU director Vince Farrugia implied that government had partially accepted his organisation's demands to introduce a system of withholding tax for all income from rents with a lower burden in the case of rents subsidised by the State for social reasons.

In filing the libel suit, the former GRTU director Vince Farrugia had said the article in question was intended to damage his reputation and benefit the MDA. He claimed a hidden agenda on the part of MDA president Falzon and its vice president Sandro Chetcuti, who he pointed out, had been charged with Farrugia’s attempted murder in a punch-up, at the time.

Chetcuti was eventually convicted of slight bodily harm, after Farrugia was found to have been attempting to cajole witnesses into perjuring themselves. Criminal proceedings against Farrugia, who was charged with perjury as a result, are still ongoing.

In his decision handed down this morning, magistrate Francesco Depasquale said that the evidence all pointed to the assertions made by Falzon as being “substantially correct.” The court reminded the the former GRTU official that as a person in the public eye, he was subject to higher levels of criticism “in the supreme interest of the truth and of the general public. MaltaToday's readers, in this case, had every right to have this exposed to them.”