Cachia Caruana files libel suit over ‘puff’ comment

Malta's former permanent representative to the European Union, Richard Cachia Caruana, has filed a libel suit against former Labour minister and until recently a One TV chat-show host Joe Grima, for comments he made about him on Faceboo

Cachia Caruana claimed that Grima made libellous allegations in his regard when he called him a 'puff' [Grima brusquely dubbed the PN strategist 'Rich il-puff'] and alleging he was selling off a villa for €5 million with an 'exclusive' permit for a pool.

Grima resigned from his One TV show Inkontri a few weeks ago after reacting in the most ungraceful of manners on his Facebook wall, in a comment he passed on Catholic Herald writer Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith, a priest who penned a critical obituary of Labour prime minister Dom Mintoff.

Writing on his Facebook wall, Grima told Lucie-Smith to 'fuck off'' and that he should have 'paedophile' priests to 'show [him] the ropes'. An unrelenting Grima not only failed to apologise but a few days later he referred to Cachia Caruana as 'Rich il-puff'.

After causing a huge public uproar, Labour leader Joseph Muscat did his best to dissociate himself from Grima and the former minister submitted his resignation.

Muscat accepted the resignation of Grima from One TV. In his resignation letter, Grima said: "I feel that neither you nor the Labour Party should in any way pay a price for what was, in every way, a slip-up which is being turned into one attack after another on you and on the party."

Grima first entered the political fray in 1976 and was elected to parliament thanks to a casual election for a seat vacated by the infamous Labour minister Lorry Sant. He was Mintoff's special envoy for Europe, North Africa and the Middle east, before being appointed industry and commerce ministry in 1981. In the years following Alfred Sant's election as Labour leader in 1992, Grima re-emerged from the political wilderness and anchored a discussion programme on the Nationalist Party's television station, openly supporting his former nemesis Eddie Fenech Adami.

Yet, after Sant's resignation and Joseph Muscat's election in 2008, Grima was once again welcomed back to the Labour Party, hosting a television show on Labour's One Television and being a noisy and indomitable critic of his original enemy - the Nationalist Party.