When Edward Zammit Lewis got his father to sue the quiz master because he lost

You couldn’t make these things up, but they really do reveal some very unpleasant character traits, which – perhaps entirely coincidentally – are shared by Franco Debono and Joseph Muscat, who were in the same class.

While still at school, Edward Zammit Lewis took part in a quiz show on TVM. This was in 1989, when he was 16. His team lost, and Zammit Lewis claimed that it was because they weren’t given enough time to answer a question.

Assuming that they would have won given those few extra seconds to come up with the answer, Zammit Lewis had his father sue the producers of the show – Charles Xuereb and Raymond Briffa – on his personal behalf, not the team’s, for damages equivalent to the prize he felt had been his due, a trip to Rome. Minors cannot file civil suits but need their legal guardian to do it on their behalf.

And his father complied, rather than tell his son to grow up, get a sense of perspective, go chase some girls at 16, and not waste other people’s time and money in court. When Edward Zammit Lewis turned 18, he took over the case himself.

It dragged on for 12 years, until in 2001 the Court of Appeal overturned the judgement which had awarded Edward Zammit Lewis Lm250 as compensation for missing out on his schoolboy quiz prize. By then he was 28, a lawyer and probably married already.

Read the Court of Appeal’s very lengthy judgement about ED ZL’s quiz prize here:

When Edward Zammit Lewis sued the quiz master

From Edward Zammit Lewis’s official website