Carmelo Abela's libel victory over Jason Azzopardi confirmed on appeal

Updated 3pm with Labour statement

Carmelo Abela has had a libel victory over Jason Azzopardi confirmed on appeal.

The Labour MP was awarded €7,000 in damages last September when a court ruled that Azzopardi had defamed him by linking him to a failed 2010 bank robbery. Azzopardi was also ordered to cover court fees related to the case. 

Azzopardi filed an appeal against that decision, but on Wednesday a court of appeal presided by Mr Justice Lawrence Mintoff confirmed the original decision in its entirety.

The court of appeal ruled that Azzopardi's appeal was not justified, as he had failed to provide sufficient facts to back his claims and the statements he had published about Abela were defamatory, rather than legitimate expressions of honest opinion as he claimed. 

Azzopardi's allegations were based on claims made by known criminals seeking presidential pardons, inherently weakening their reliability, the court added.

In a statement, Azzopardi said he disagreed with the decision and intended to take the case all the way to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

To do so, he must first exhaust all his local court options and will therefore have to file a constitutional case.

"Time will prove me right," Azzopardi wrote on social media following the appeal decision. 

The dispute between the two men centres on a Facebook post Azzopardi published in 2021, in which he linked Abela – at the time a minister – to the botched attempt to rob an HSBC branch in Qormi back in 2010. At the time, Abela worked at the bank branch.

While Azzopardi’s post did not identify Abela by name, the court concluded that readers could easily understand it referred to him "with no stretch of the imagination".

The court had gone on to remark that “insinuations disguised in suggestive terms were sometimes more insidious and upped the intensity of the defamatory sting” and noted that Azzopardi had at no point argued that he was not referring to Abela.

Abela has consistently denied having anything to do with the bank robbery. The court of appeal also noted that HSBC had subsequently promoted him following the botched heist and never disciplined him for anything to do with it. 

In a statement, the Labour Party said the decision confirmed that Abela "is politician of integrity, while the Nationalist Party has ended up as a party of liars." 

Azzopardi was previously a Nationalist MP but split with the party in an acrimonious fashion in 2022.

Labour nevertheless linked the two, saying that the court sentence "confirms how much the Nationalist Party protects and gives refuge to whoever in our country thinks that he has a divine right to make false allegations on people."