Court says Orizzont article on sheep farmer "substantially true"

Gozitan sheep farmer Ganni Attard has lost a libel case he filed against the editor of the newspaper L-Orizzont.

Attard had claimed that an article titled “The People pay for justice delayed,” which dealt with the €600,000 cost to the public purse of keeping watch over his unregistered herd, was libelous.

L-Orizzont was reporting on the fact that police officers had been stationed at Attard's farm on constant watch to ensure that the herd was not being farmed.

The article had stated, amongst other things, that Attard had been given the opportunity to register his herd but had failed to do so, had thousands of euros of pending fines, and that he had been found guilty of keeping an unlicenced firearm and ammunition.

Attard denied the article’s claims, describing them as “completely untrue.”

Magistrate Francesco Depasquale noted that Attard had been convicted of the firearms offence by a jury in 1985, and of illegally taking over land belonging to third parties in 2002, as well as illegally keeping sheep and goats in 2017. He is accused of social benefit fraud in other proceedings, the court observed, and a number of other pending civil cases filed by the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Veterinary Services were also identified.

The court said it “sees absolutely nothing defamatory in the article complained of, which is full of facts which are substantially true and correct.”

Journalists are supposed to investigate and report on items of public interest, said the court, “especially when there are costs from public funds which were paid and are being contested.”