PBS ordered to pay Peter Busuttil €10,500 for production of 1998 Jazz Festival

The Jazz Festival is usually filmed by PBS crew itself for broadcast a few months later.

But in 1998, two days before that year’s edition of the Jazz Festival, then PBS Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Albert Marshall had called Busuttil to film the Jazz Festival himself as Marshall did not have “neither the workers nor the equipment to record the Festival”.

Busuttil told the Court that Marshall had told him this “with the approval of all PBS representatives”

“I was faced with certain urgency, because in two days I had to find four cameramen, all the equipment necessary as well as people to operate the equipment, that is, an outside broadcasting unit,” Busuttil told the Court.

Busuttil explained how he had managed to film the Jazz Festival, and he did it “in a more extensive manner to permit the production of a special programme about it”.

He also told the Court that Marshall had assured him that he was going to remain “within the budget that PBS usually allocates for this type of activity”.

Busuttil had only sent the bill in January 2001 since there was a very good relationship with PBS at the time.

However, as soon as he sent the bill, “problems started rising between himself and PBS”.

Busuttil told the Court that he had not received a reply for his invoice. However, since he had to make some payments to PBS, he proposed a meeting between the two parties to reach an agreement; however these meetings never took place, leading Busuttil to open this Court case against PBS.

Testifying on 6 May 2004, then PBS Chief Executive Andrew Psaila had confirmed that PBS had received that invoice from Peter Busuttil regarding the 1998 Jazz Festival.

Psaila told the Court that the amount requested in the invoice was “justified”.

However, according to Psaila, there was “an agreement between them that he would not be paid with financial compensation but with a programme series”.

Psaila explained how in June 1999, he had received a complaint from Culture Department Director Joe Mifsud who had complained that the 1998 Jazz Festival had not been broadcast, leading sponsors who were due to appear on the programme to complain.

On his part, the witness told Mifsud that the programme could not be broadcast “because whoever was scheduled to produce it, the complainant, had not produced the programme”.

Psaila had learnt that after a meeting between the then PBS Chairman and the complainant, they had reached a written agreement, that five programmes about the 1998 Jazz Festival called “Jazz Box” would be broadcast immediately. These programmes had been broadcast as agreed.

Under the new arrangement, Busuttil had to produce thirteen programmes called “Live” where he would be collecting directly advertising instead of PBS “and instead renounce for the rights that he had for the filming of the Jazz Festival comprising the Jazz Box series”

The former Acting PBS Chairman had told the Court that five of the programmes had to be broadcast in July and the remaining in September 1999.

However, according to Psaila, only the first five programmes were broadcast since the Broadcasting Authority (BA) had complained about “its content as well as violating the BA regulations on advertising,” and PBS stopped the complainant from broadcasting the whole series.

Psaila also told the Court that he had learnt that the other eight programmes from the Live series had been broadcast on a private tv station.

In its judgement on 5 October 2010, the Magistrates’ Court, presided by Magistrate Consuelo Scerri Herrera ruled that PBS had not “proven sufficiently to the Court that the original agreement between the contendents had been changed, hence the agreement between both sides was still valid”.

The Court also ordered PBS to pay interest on the amount due as from the notification date of the official letter to PBS on 28 September 2001.