Libel suits are not the answer: a police investigation is

For some reason, the gang of criminals at the Office of the Prime Minister seem to think that suing for libel proves something. It doesn’t. It proves nothing.

Anybody can sue anyone for anything at any time. There is no bar. There is no standard. There is no threshold. You get a compliant lawyer to write up the writ, you go to the registry at the courthouse, you pay your filing fees, and it’s done.

Meanwhile, the cretins you wish to impress are lining up to say that you must be right/innocent, because you sued.

How ridiculous is that. When blackguards and knaves like these sue for libel, it’s to avoid having to answer in the proper manner, by means of a statement delineating the facts. It’s also to try to intimidate the person/newspaper into desisting from pursuing the matter, and pour encourager les autres – to scare other journalists/newspapers into not picking up the subject.

But when a journalist reports – reports, not alleges – that the Prime Minister’s chief of staff took kickbacks on the sale of Maltese citizenship, from the accountant who set up his company in Panama, then this is not a matter for a civil suit for libel. It’s a matter for a police investigation – of the Prime Minister’s chief of staff.

What we are talking about here is a serious crime. You don’t prove or disprove the commission of a serious crime by means of a civil suit for libel in which the burden of proof is on the defendant (me), and which will not lead to the conviction of the plaintiff (Schembri) anyway.

The proving or disproving of serious crimes is a matter for the Criminal Court, with Schembri in the dock and the police/Attorney General’s office conducting his prosecution.

I don’t think I can be more clear than this. Those who are allowing Keith Schembri to get away with using libel suits to tackle a matter that belongs in the criminal court and with the police literally do not know the difference between a European democracy and Azerbaijan.

What they should be asking instead is why the police have not arrested and interrogated the Prime Minister’s chief of staff and Brian Tonna.

The police should do so immediately.

As for those libel suits, the Prime Minister’s chief of staff wrote on Facebook this morning – as dignified and appropriate as expected – and said that he will keep filing one libel suit against me after another to “stop” me.

He will not stop me. Each response which I have to file to a libel suit from him costs around €400 in court fees. It is money well spent. Of course, being a money-grubber from the gutter who counts every cent and who would, if he were subjected to the same treatment as Bettino Craxi, get down on all fours to pick up the coins, he does not understand why anybody would want to ‘waste’ his or her money this way.

It’s not wasted. It’s worth every cent. And using financial penalties to stop a journalist reporting on the corruption and criminality at the Office of the Prime Minister does not go down well with those who voted to live in a European Union member state and not Ilham Aliyev’s Baku.