Camilleri stole, paid back €5,000. But his false denial is not defamation, says court

MaltaToday managing editor Saviour Balzan was denied a claim for defamation by former Times journalist Ivan Camilleri, after the Court decided his falsities on a shoplifting incident, were not sufficiently defamatory to Balzan, who authored the story.

In the defamation case, Valyou supermarket director Ray Mintoff confirmed to the court that Camilleri had paid back the supermarket a total of €5,000 over previous incidents of shoplifting.

The testimony confirmed MaltaToday’s story on Camilleri’s shoplifting of items of value from the Naxxar supermarket.

Mintoff confronted Camilleri over an incident, insisting that he was unconvinced that this was a one-off ‘error’ and that he was considering reporting the case to the Police.

Times of Malta editor Herman Grech told the court that in December 2019 – weeks after the MaltaToday story had first been published – he confronted Mintoff about the allegation. It turned out that Mintoff had claimed that the value of goods stolen was well into the €12,000 figure and that the shoplifting had been ongoing for years. Allied Newspapers director Michel Rizzo was present at this meeting, and confirmed the statement.

Ivan Camilleri, who testified via a sworn affidavit, claimed to the court that he had “forgotten to place certain items of value at the bottom of the trolley under some packets of water” on the cashier’s conveyor belt. He said it was “an unfortunate incident”.

Camilleri then claims Ray Mintoff called him days later with a threat to report the incident to the police, and that – “feeling blackmailed and that it was not in his interest that this case is revealed” – decided to pay him €5,000.

On 19 December, Grech and Rizzo accused Camilleri of not having told them the truth, and he was sacked from his job, with The Times retracting its previous statement defending the journalist.

In her decision, Magistrate Rachel Montebello said that the defamation case filed by Saviour Balzan against Camilleri’s denial and statement on Facebook had been wrong: intended at “advancing evidence that proves that this was not an isolated case or a mishap as claimed by the defendant, but one of a series of shoplifting crimes over the course of time.”

But Montebello said Balzan’s request to seek the preservation of CCTV footage inside Valyou Supermarket as evidence was “wrong” because it would not prove Camilleri’s statements being “defamatory” – “Not every false statement is necessarily defamatory,” Montebello said.

The court said it was not its role to decide whether the shoplifting incident had indeed happened, but whether Camilleri’s statement on Facebook denying the story as “an invention and a lie and full of inaccuracies” was defamatory.

“In this case the Court has only to determine whether the defendant’s statement caused, or had the propensity, to cause serious reputational harm to Balzan,” Montebello said.

Camilleri, in his impugned Facebook statement, had accused Balzan of tarnishing the reputation of “serious people who spent their lives fighting what is wrong”. Balzan felt this was defamatory in his regard as a journalist.

But the court found that in his testimony, Balzan had conceded that he was “not in it for Camilleri’s pound of flesh... I’m not interested in bringing him down further” – so Montebello felt the plaintiff was not interested in moral damages.

“His interest is in determining that the story he penned is indeed the truth... then he does not believe his reputation suffered damage from the defendant’s statement.”

Citing Collins, the Court admitted that someone accused of being “dishonest or a fraud... or actuated by some improper motive” was a defamatory statement.

But she accepted that Camilleri’s Facebook statement was ‘a reply to an attack’ and agreed that he was entitled to this kind of reaction against the attack on his reputation – “no matter how harsh, hasty, untrue or libellous the publication would be but for the circumstances, the law declares it privileged because the amount of public inconvenience from the restriction of freedom of speech or writing would far out-balance that arising from the infliction of a private injury.”

Montebello said the European Court had decided that publishers of allegations must expect harsh and provocatory, even exaggerated, if not defamatory reactions.

She declared Camilleri’s statement, “though an attack on the plaintiff’s bona fide intentions”, was reasonably expected for his defence.